What is an unrestricted production? I was reading an article at 

What does &quot;context&quot; in &quot;context-free grammar&quot; refer to?

The production 

zA -&gt; xy


is described as being an "unrestricted" production. In what way is it "unrestricted"?

I even visited https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unrestricted_grammar

which talks about unrestricted grammar as the one that is comprised of productions which have no restriction on LHS or RHS. On this note, I assume that an unrestricted production is the one with no restriction on LHS or RHS.

What restrictions are being talked about and how is the production free from such restrictions?
A single rule can not be "unrestricted".

The whole set of rules is $(T \cup N)^+ \to (T \cup N)^*$. So the class of unrestricted grammars may use any rule from this set.

Restricted classes of grammars are only allowed to use a strict subset of all rles, e.g.


right-regular grammars are restricted to $N \to T^*N^{\{0,1\}}$, and
context-free grammars to $N \to (T \cup N)^*$.


By going through the Chomsky hierarchy, you will note that the rule

$\qquad zA \to xy$

is not admitted in any but the type-0 grammars; try to see why it's not a "context-sensitive rule". That does not mean it is only ever allowed in the unrestricted class -- just that it's not in any on this list. There are many more classes.