newspeak
/ˈn(j)uːspiːk/
Word Rarity
Very rare
Frequency: Zipf frequency 2.02 in modern English
17
Scrabble Score
8
Letters
2
Syllables
7
Unique Chars
Meaning
name
The fictional language devised to meet the needs of Ingsoc and designed to restrict the words, and thereby the thoughts, of the citizens of Oceania in the 1949 novel Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell.
name
A highly dynamic and reflective programming language descended from Smalltalk, supporting both object-oriented and functional programming.
noun
Use of ambiguous, misleading, or euphemistic words in order to deceive the listener, especially by politicians and officials.
Uncountable
Example Sentences
- "In Orwell’s 1984, the use of ambiguous and confusing language with restricted grammar and limited vocabulary, known as Newspeak, diminishes the range of a person’s thought process. For example, in Newspeak, the term “Fake News” would replace the words: accurate, correct, factual and reliable news reporting."
- "The instrument of this dumbing down in Nineteen Eighty-Four was Newspeak, the official language of the English Socialist Party (Ingsoc). Newspeak was a sort of Totalitarian Esperanto that sought gradually to diminish the range of what was thinkable by eliminating, contracting and manufacturing words."
- "Many modern languages like Haskell, Scala, and Newspeak offer parser combinators as libraries on top of the core language."
- "All the Nazi or Fascist schoolbooks made use of an impoverished vocabulary, and an elementary syntax, in order to limit the instruments for complex and critical reasoning. But we must be ready to identify other kinds of Newspeak, even if they take the apparently innocent form of a popular talk show."
- "In 2020, Trump has provided the American people with plenty of Newspeak to explain away the current and growing nationwide spread of the COVID-19 Pandemic."
- "Yet no-one would deny that a form of ‘newspeak’, however altered, is all too prevalent. Where [George] Orwell’s society was governed by the stick, we are offered the carrot. The truncation of the language on ‘Airstrip One’ was a logical response to the harsh social engineering that engendered it. The soothing, delusory world of ‘equality’, of much-touted ‘democracy’, has created a ‘newspeak’ all its own. Rather than shorten the language it is infinitely broadened; instead of curt monosyllables, there are mellifluous, calming phrases, designed to allay suspicions, modify facts and divert one’s attention from difficulties."
Etymology
From new + speak, coined by George Orwell in 1949 in his novel Nineteen Eighty-Four. The programming language was so named because of its “shrinkable” design, following Orwell's idea of a continually diminishing vocabulary in Newspeak.