indirect

From Middle French indirect, from Late Latin indirectus

• (Received Pronunciation) IPA^(key): /ˌɪndaɪˈɹɛkt/, /ˌɪndɪˈɹɛkt/
• (General American, Canada) IPA^(key): /ˌɪndəˈɹɛkt/, /ˌɪndaɪˈɹɛkt/
• Rhymes: -ɛkt

indirect (comparative more indirect, superlative most indirect)

1. (Can we clean up⁽⁺⁾ this sense?) Not direct; roundabout; deceiving; setting a trap; confusing.
   • 1974, Thomas S. Szasz, M.D., chapter 8, in The Myth of Mental Illness‎, →ISBN, page 139-140:

     Indirect messages permit communicative contacts when, without them, the alternatives would be total inhibition, silence, and solitude on the one hand, or, on the other, communicative behavior that is direct, offensive, and hence forbidden. This is a painful choice. In actual practice, neither alternative is likely to result in the gratification of personal or sexual needs. In this dilemma, indirect communications provide a useful compromise. As an early move in the dating game, the young man might invite the young woman to dinner or to the movies.

• direct

• indirection

indirect (plural indirects)

1. Something that is indirect.
   • 2002, Peter Watermeyer, Handbook for Process Plant Project Engineers

     In the case of a piece of equipment such as a pump, the supplier's costs may be broken down into the directs of labour, material, and component costs on the one hand, and the indirects of customized engineering, sales, factory overheads, and order management costs on the other.

   • 2010, Anna M. Gil-Lafuente and José M. Merigó (editos), Computational Intelligence in Business and Economics

     Gradually analytical thinking was taking a greater awareness of the importance it took for all the investigation system of the possible identification or traceability of fixed costs and, in general, of the indirects of other times.

indirect (third-person singular simple present indirects, present participle indirecting, simple past and past participle indirected)

1. (programming, transitive) To access by means of indirection; to dereference.
   • 1997, Cay S. Horstmann, Practical Object-Oriented Development in C++ and Java (page 385)

     The X operations access the data fields by indirecting through the _rep pointer.

   • 2012, Geerd-R. Hoffmann, ‎Dimitris K. Maretis, The Dawn of Massively Parallel Processing in Meteorology

     These correspond to an indirected parallel write and an indirected parallel read operation respectively.

• indicter, reindict

From in- +‎ direct.

• IPA^(key): /ɛ̃.di.ʁɛkt/

indirect (feminine singular indirecte, masculine plural indirects, feminine plural indirectes)

1. indirect

• “indirect” in le Trésor de la langue française informatisé (The Digitized Treasury of the French Language).