newspeak

plural newspeaks

1. uncountableusuallyUse of ambiguous, misleading, or euphemistic words in order to deceive the listener, especially by politicians and officials.

   […] Soviet ideology itself may be more productively viewed as the result of conscious attempts to explicate and rationalize assorted discursive strategies, or mechanisms, of newspeak, in much the same way as grammatical rules are invented to describe diverse linguistic practices.

   2002, Slava Gerovitch, “The Cold War in Code Words: The Newspeak of Soviet Science”, in From Newspeak to Cyberspeak: A History of Soviet Cybernetics, Cambridge, Mass.; London: MIT Press, →ISBN, page 47

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   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.

   1984, Jonathon Green, “Introduction”, in Newspeak: A Dictionary of Jargon, London: Routledge & Kegal Paul plc, ISBN 978-0-7100-9685-2; republished Abingdon, Oxon.; New York, N.Y.: Routledge, 2014, ISBN 978-0-415-73271-0, page ix

   [T]he last stage in the evolution of the Russian literary avant-garde and its final demise was marked by its sharp and growing conflict with the rise of newspeak. The concept of newspeak has been with us now for quite some time. However, it only recently began to be treated as an exponent of a certain cultural vision advanced by sheer and impudent political power. At the same time, it is more than that. Newspeak can be defined as discourse, proper or peculiar to the totalitarian state and transmitted through the manipulative use of language to all sectors and institutions of the state.

   1995, Edward Możejko, “Between Symbolist Decline and the Rise of Newspeak: Mapping the Dynamics of the Russian Literary Avant-Garde”, in Christian Berg, Frank Durieux, Geert Lernout, editors, The Turn of the Century: Modernism and Modernity in Literature and the Arts/Le tournant du siècle : Le modernisme et la modernité dans la littérature et les arts (European Cultures; 3), Berlin; New York, N.Y.: Walter de Gruyter, →ISBN, page 327

   Antonyms: oldspeak

1. fictionThe 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.

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   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.

   2020 November 19, Richard Weintraub, “Trump's use of 'Newspeak' to explain away virus puts Americans at risk | For What It's Worth”, in Pocono Record, archived from the original on 17 Apr 2026

   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.

   2021 January 5, Peter Foster, “Peter Foster: Sustainable Newspeak by 2050”, in Financial Post, archived from the original on 31 Mar 2021

2. computer languagesA highly dynamic and reflective programming language descended from Smalltalk, supporting both object-oriented and functional programming.

   Many modern languages like Haskell, Scala, and Newspeak offer parser combinators as libraries on top of the core language.

   2010, Debasish Ghosh, DSLs in Action, Simon and Schuster, →ISBN

plural Newspeaks

1. uncountableusuallyAlternative letter-case form of newspeak.

   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.

   2020 November 19, Richard Weintraub, “Trump's use of 'Newspeak' to explain away virus puts Americans at risk | For What It's Worth”, in Pocono Record

   1 more example

   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.

   1995 June 22, Umberto Eco, “Ur-Fascism”, in The New York Review of Books, archived from the original on 31 Jan 2017