directed

1. 1
   verb

   Past tense and past participle of direct.

   The committee directed most of the budget toward flood relief.

   He directed the documentary over two difficult years.

   Note

   One spelling does two grammatical jobs. It is the simple past (she directed the film) and also the participle that follows have in the perfect or be in the passive (the film was directed by her). The passive can also carry the dated sense of addressing mail, as in a letter directed to the editor, which now sounds old-fashioned beside addressed.

2. 2
   adjective

   Expressed in a way that emphasizes the speaker's own point of view.

   The op-ed was sharply directed, foregrounding the writer's convictions at every turn.

   She gave a directed account of the dispute, framed entirely around her own perspective.

   Similarsubjective, opinionated, slanted, partisan

   Oppositeobjective, impartial, neutral, balanced

3. 3
   adjective

   Having the properties of a directed graph, with edges that each carry a specific direction from one vertex to another.

   The team modeled the road network as a directed graph, with each arrow marking a one-way street.

   In a directed structure, an edge from one node to another does not imply a return edge.

   Oppositeundirected

   Note

   Graph theorists use it in an exact sense. Each edge is an ordered pair of vertices running from a tail to a head, so an edge from u to v says nothing about one from v to u. Arrows are the usual way to draw it. Do not confuse it with the set-theory term, where the word describes an ordering of elements rather than one-way connections.

4. 4
   adjective

   Of an ordered set, having an upper bound within the set for every pair of its elements.

   The natural numbers form a directed set, since any two of them have a larger number above both.

   Mathematicians use a directed index set to define nets, generalizing the idea of a sequence.

   Note

   An order-theoretic idea that asks surprisingly little. The ordering need only be a preorder, and two elements may be incomparable so long as something in the set sits above both. That weak condition is enough to do real work: directed sets index nets in topology, generalizing sequences, and they underpin the construction of direct limits in algebra.

Showing meanings only. Show all 4