From Longman Dictionary of Contemporary Englishindirect speechˌindirect ˈspeech British English, indirect discourse American English (also reported speech) noun [uncountable] technical SLGa way of reporting what someone said without repeating their exact words. For example, in the sentence ‘Julia said that she didn’t want to go’, the clause ‘that she didn’t want to go’ is indirect speech. Her actual words were ‘I don’t want to go’. → direct speech
Examples from the Corpus
indirect speech• Paraphrase and summary of the arguments of other texts correspond to indirect speech. 