directed

Directed is the past participle of direct and functions as an adjective describing something guided, controlled, or aimed toward a particular objective. The term is applied across fields to indicate intentional direction or supervision. In film, television, and theater, credits such as "directed by" name the person responsible for the creative execution of the work.

In cinema and theatre, the director oversees the artistic vision, guiding performances, pacing, framing, and overall production. Directors coordinate with writers, producers, designers, and editors. The word "directed" can also describe a project designed to fulfill a specific purpose, such as a directed study or a directed energy process, though usage varies by discipline.

In mathematics and computer science, directed denotes orientation. A directed graph, or digraph, has edges with a specified direction from one vertex to another, unlike an undirected graph. Digraphs model asymmetric relationships such as hyperlinks, citations, or task dependencies. Related concepts include in-degree and out-degree, path reachability, strong connectivity, and directed acyclic graphs (DAGs), which preclude directed cycles and are used in scheduling, data processing, and compilation flows.

In order theory, a directed set is a nonempty set with a preorder in which every pair of elements has an upper bound. Nets indexed by directed sets generalize convergence beyond sequences. The term "directed" thus signals a defined orientation or ordering principle that governs the system or structure in question.