indirect discourse

[ in-di-rekt dis-kawrs ]

noun

1. the reporting of what a speaker said consisting not of the speaker's exact words but of a version transformed for grammatical inclusion in a larger sentence, as in She said she was not at all hungry.

Word History and Origins

Origin of indirect discourse¹

First recorded in 1845–50

Example Sentences

Yet it’s not just pithy quotations, real or imagined, that Todd is borrowing here; she is also using Austen’s famous “free indirect discourse.”

From Washington Post

The novel, peppered with rants about ex-wives, newsroom politics, and the Long Island Expressway, is an astonishing read for many reasons, including O’Reilly’s credible ability to write in free indirect discourse.

From The New Yorker

A third principle is that indirect discourse is not always introduced with an expression like he said that or she thought that; sometimes it is implicit in the context.

From Literature

“She didn’t invent free indirect discourse,” Wells says, “it had been used by others—but she’s certainly the one who took it the farthest and established its primacy, its necessariness.”

From Time

At her house, I start again, from the beginning: conditional clauses, indirect discourse, the use of the passive.

From The New Yorker