In common usage, being ‘frank’ means that one is candid and honest in speech. William Shakespeare made early use of the word in this sense, writing in Henry V (1599): ‘Therefore with franke and uncurbed plainnesse,/Tell us the Dolphins minde.’ Later, Edmund Burke in Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790) spoke of ‘conversation frank and open’; and Thomas Carlyle in his Miscellanies of 1857 would write that two characters in Goethe’s Faust, Helena and Phorcyas, were ‘frank and downright in speech.’
The English word ‘frank’ traces its origin to the Franks of ancient Germany. The northern portion of the province of Gaule was conquered by these warlike barbarians in the 5th century AD, when Roman power there collapsed. They subjected the native Gallo-Romans, and were the only inhabitants who could claim the status of freemen. Franks were thus free from servitude, and the Old French word franc came to mean ‘free’.
‘Frank’ entered into English in the Late Middle Ages with this meaning, which has now fallen out of use. In time, it came to mean that one was free of restraints. Subsequently, it acquired its modern meaning of being open and honest in one’s speaking.
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