Word.ws English Dictionary

clockwork orange

clockwork orange noun: a person or organism with a mechanistic morality or lack of free will.

Noun

clockwork orange (plural clockwork oranges)

  1. A person or organism with a mechanistic morality or lack of free will.
    • Contrarily, he may be saying, “Look what your computerized, commodified society has made of me—a clockwork orange, for all appearances organic but mechanical."1996, Mark Dery, Escape Velocity
    • The telos of the pathologization of crime is the perfected robot or “clockwork orange” of present-day behaviorism and sociobiology, descendants of eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century associationists like Jeremy Bentham.1998, Patrick Brantlinger, The Reading Lesson: The Threat of Mass Literacy in Nineteenth-Century British Fiction

Proper noun capitalized: Clockwork Orange

the Clockwork Orange

  1. (dated) Nickname for Netherlands national football team
    • Lifelong fans, Riverside residents and a whole lot of new Netherlands supporters got the chance to see “Clockwork Orange” in action during the approximately 75-minute session.2026 June 10, Dave D’Marko, “Community practice gives fans chance to see Dutch soccer superstars up close”, in Fox4, Riverside, archived from the original on 16 Jun 2026
    Synonyms:
    The Flying Dutchmen

Examples of clockwork orange in a sentence

  • This one took reality to be a large machine, a ‘clockwork orange', an automaton.1999, Diederik Aerts, Jan Broekaert, Ernest Mathijs, Einstein Meets Magritte: An Interdisciplinary Reflection: The White Book of "Einstein...
  • Under the archbishop's ceiling, the self is not a clockwork orange programmed by the state but something more unnerving: Peer Gynt's onion, layers of performance without a core.2004, Enoch Brater, Arthur Miller's America: Theater and Culture in a Time of Change:

Synonyms of clockwork orange

  • The Flying Dutchmen

Forms of clockwork orange

Noun
pluralclockwork oranges
Proper noun
alternative formClockwork Oranje

Origin of clockwork orange

From the novel A Clockwork Orange (1962) by Anthony Burgess, in which the main character is programmed to be incapable of antisocial behavior.

From clockwork orange, after the team's mechanical precision and orange uniform. The nickname was mostly used in the 1970s in reference to Johan Cruyff's total football tatic, but still see some usage to this day.

Questions about clockwork orange

What does clockwork orange mean?
Clockwork orange means a person or organism with a mechanistic morality or lack of free will.
How do you use clockwork orange in a sentence?
This one took reality to be a large machine, a ‘clockwork orange', an automaton.
What part of speech is clockwork orange?
Clockwork orange can be a noun or a proper noun.
What is the plural of clockwork orange?
The plural of clockwork orange is clockwork oranges.

Words near clockwork orange in the dictionary

  1. clockwinders
  2. clockwise
  3. clockwisely
  4. clockwiseness
  5. clockwork
  6. clockwork orange
  7. clockwork oranges
  8. clockwork radio
  9. clockwork radios
  10. clockwork universe
  11. clockwork universes

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: clockwork orange (page history and authors); Clockwork Orange (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

Last updated:

Cite this entry: “clockwork orange.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/clockwork_orange. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.