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indirect

From Wiktionary, the free dictionary

English

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Etymology

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From Middle French indirect, from Late Latin indirectus.

Pronunciation

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Adjective

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indirect (comparative more indirect, superlative most indirect)

  1. Not direct:
    1. Not of obvious or immediate cause, but as a secondary result.
      The direct result of socialising every day in the bars may be happiness and meeting new people, but the indirect results could be addiction, or even poverty.
    2. Not focused straight at the target or subject; whose true aim appears secondary or obscure.
      While not mentioning any of their competitors by name, the CEO made some indirect statements that they were acting immorally.
      Se asked him some indirect questions to ascertain whether he was single.
      • 1974, Thomas S. Szasz, M.D., chapter 8, in The Myth of Mental Illness, →ISBN, pages 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.
    3. Not involving the quickest, shortest, or most convenient path; oblique.
      In an effort to beat the traffic jams, they opted to take an indirect route to their destination.
    4. (mathematics, logic, of a proof) Employing argument by contradiction; making use the law of the excluded middle; arguing via the contrapositive.
  2. Figuratively
    1. (archaic) Not straightforward, fair, or honest; corrupt.

Antonyms

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Derived terms

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Translations

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Noun

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indirect (plural indirects)

  1. (finance) An indirect cost.
    • 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.
  2. An indirect radiator
    • 1902, William S. Monroe, “Chapter 4”, in Steam Heating and Ventilation:
      Indirect radiators are seldom installed except for rooms on the first or second floors; and in the former case the duct, D, is very short, and in the latter it is usually from 12 to 16 feet long. It should be stated in this connection that indirects of large size should be spread out as much as possible so as to give a large area against the current of air.

Verb

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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.

Anagrams

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French

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Etymology

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From in- +‎ direct.

Pronunciation

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Adjective

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

  1. indirect

Derived terms

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Further reading

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Romanian

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Etymology

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Borrowed from French indirect, from Latin indirectus. Equivalent to in- +‎ direct.

Adjective

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indirect m or n (feminine singular indirectă, masculine plural indirecți, feminine and neuter plural indirecte)

  1. indirect

Declension

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singular plural
masculine neuter feminine masculine neuter feminine
nominative-
accusative 		indefinite indirect indirectă indirecți indirecte
definite indirectul indirecta indirecții indirectele
genitive-
dative 		indefinite indirect indirecte indirecți indirecte
definite indirectului indirectei indirecților indirectelor
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