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The quality of being direct; straightness; straightforwardness; immediateness.

The quality or state of being indirect; obliquity; deviousness; crookedness.

Cunning; disposed to cunning indirectness of dealing; crafty; as, an artful boy. [The usual sense.] Artful in speech, in action, and in mind. Pope. The artful revenge of various animals. Darwin.

A roundabout or indirect course; indirectness. [Obs.] S. Richardson.

Out of a straight line; winding; varying from directness; as, a devious path or way.

The quality of being explicit; clearness; directness. Jer. Taylor.

Straightforwardness; explicitness; directness. [Archaic] Dante's concise forthrightness of phrase. Hawthorne.

Oblique course or means; dishonest practices; indirectness. "By indirections find directions out." Shak.

Shak. The translator of Homer should penetrate himself with a sense of the plainness and directness of Homer's style. M. Arnold.

Characterized by sharpness, directness, or pithiness of expression; terse; epigrammatic; especially, directed to a particular person or thing. His moral pleases, not his pointed wit. Pope. Pointed arch (Arch.), an arch with a pointed crown. -- Pointed style (Arch.), a name given to that style of architecture in which…

Speaking with directness; plain-spoken. [Colloq. U.S.] Lowell.