Word.ws English Dictionary

duckspeak

duckspeak noun: thoughtless or formulaic speech.

Noun

duckspeak (uncountable)

  1. Thoughtless or formulaic speech.
    • Because his utterances detour through his brain - rather than, as in duckspeak, coming straight from the well-programmed larynx - he has Socratic doubts...1989, Richard Rorty, Contingency, irony, and solidarity
    • I think you might just have had the courage to realize things I didn't know were there. That's really duckspeak, isn't it. I only thought I was happy.2004, Joan Elizabeth Lloyd, Club Fantasy

Examples of duckspeak in a sentence

  • They have developed a particularly obnoxious form of ungood duckspeak.2006, Stephen Ingle, The social and political thought of George Orwell:
  • To be sure, he provides very many juicy examples of such duckspeak or bullshit...2008, Richard J Alexander, Framing Discourse on the Environment: A Critical Discourse Approach:

Origin of duckspeak

From duck + speak, coined by George Orwell in 1949 as part of the Newspeak in his novel Nineteen Eighty-Four.

Questions about duckspeak

What does duckspeak mean?
Duckspeak means thoughtless or formulaic speech.
How do you use duckspeak in a sentence?
They have developed a particularly obnoxious form of ungood duckspeak.
What part of speech is duckspeak?
Duckspeak is a noun.

Words near duckspeak in the dictionary

  1. duckshoves
  2. duckshoving
  3. ducksmeat
  4. ducksona
  5. ducksonas
  6. duckspeak
  7. Duckstein
  8. duckstone
  9. duckstones
  10. Ducksworth
  11. Ducksworths

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: duckspeak (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.

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