Maximal free expression

A free expression which is as large as it can be in the sense that is not a proper subexpression of another free expression.

This is within the context of a given expression, and subexpressions are partially ordered with respect to containment, and have finite length, so there will always be maximal (but possibly not unique) free (sub-)expressions. Note that there is a subtle but important difference between the words maximal and maximum. An element x of a partially ordered set Failed to parse (SVG (MathML can be enabled via browser plugin): Invalid response ("Math extension cannot connect to Restbase.") from server "https://wikimedia.org/api/rest_v1/":): {\displaystyle (S, \le)} is called maximal if there is no Failed to parse (SVG (MathML can be enabled via browser plugin): Invalid response ("Math extension cannot connect to Restbase.") from server "https://wikimedia.org/api/rest_v1/":): {\displaystyle y \in S} such that Failed to parse (SVG (MathML can be enabled via browser plugin): Invalid response ("Math extension cannot connect to Restbase.") from server "https://wikimedia.org/api/rest_v1/":): {\displaystyle x \le y} , and it is called a maximum if Failed to parse (SVG (MathML can be enabled via browser plugin): Invalid response ("Math extension cannot connect to Restbase.") from server "https://wikimedia.org/api/rest_v1/":): {\displaystyle \forall y \in S, x \le y} . If a maximum exists, it is unique, but there can be many maximal (but not maximum) elements.