Phrase guide

free indirect discourse

noun · 1 senses · updated from the 2026-07-25 local source snapshot

Definitions and examples are grouped by meaning. Pronunciation, history, word forms, translations, descendants, synonyms, antonyms, derived terms, and related words appear whenever the source provides them.

Sound

Pronunciation

Each Play button uses your device's default local English voice, or a natural local fallback. The selected voice name appears after playback. This is synthesized speech, not a source recording.

No pronunciation record was provided for this word.

1

noun

Meaning 1

Synonym of free indirect speech.

Definition source: English Wiktionary via Wiktextract

Usage: uncountable

Examples

  • 1993, Monika Fludernik, The Fictions of Language and the Languages of Fiction, Taylor & Francis (Routledge), 2005, Taylor & Francis e-Library, page 4, Banfield, like most free indirect discourse studies in English, is blithely unaware of the findings presented by nearly a century of German criticism.
  • 2000, Henry Louis Gates Jr., Zora Neale Hurston and the Speakerly Text, Cheryl A. Wall (editor, Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God, Oxford University Press, page 103, I use the word double here intentionally, to echo W. E. B. Du Bois's metaphor for the Afro-American's peculiar psychology of citizenship and also to avoid the limited description of free indirect discourse as a "dual voice," in Roy Pascal's term. Rather than a dual voice, free indirect discourse, as manifested in Their Eyes Were Watching God, is a dramatic way of expressing a divided self.

Meaning relationships

Synonyms: free indirect speech

Antonyms: none provided

History

Etymology

No etymology was provided for this word.