Word.ws English Dictionary

newspeak

/ˈn(j)uːspiːk/

newspeak noun: use of ambiguous, misleading, or euphemistic words in order to deceive the listener, especially by politicians and officials.

Noun (1)

newspeak (usually uncountable, plural newspeaks)

  1. (usually) Use of ambiguous, misleading, or euphemistic words in order to deceive the listener, especially by politicians and officials.
    • 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....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...
    • [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...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...
    Antonyms:
    oldspeak

Proper noun capitalized: Newspeak

Newspeak

  1. 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.
    • 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...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...2021 January 5, Peter Foster, “Peter Foster: Sustainable Newspeak by 2050”, in Financial Post, archived from the original on 31 Mar 2021
  2. A 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

Noun (2) capitalized: Newspeak

Newspeak (usually uncountable, plural Newspeaks)

  1. (usually) Alternative letter-case form of newspeak.
    • 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
    • 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

Examples of newspeak in a sentence

  • Yet no-one would deny that a form of ‘newspeak’, however altered, is all too prevalent.1984, Jonathon Green, “Introduction”, in Newspeak: A Dictionary of Jargon, London: Routledge & Kegal Paul plc, ISBN 978-0-7100-9685-2...
  • [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.1995, Edward Możejko, “Between Symbolist Decline and the Rise of Newspeak: Mapping the Dynamics of the Russian Literary Avant-Garde”, in...

Antonyms of newspeak

Forms of newspeak

pluralnewspeaks
pluralNewspeaks

Origin of newspeak

From Newspeak, coined by George Orwell in 1949. Equivalent to new + speak.

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.

Words formed from newspeak

Questions about newspeak

What does newspeak mean?
Newspeak means use of ambiguous, misleading, or euphemistic words in order to deceive the listener, especially by politicians and officials.
How do you use newspeak in a sentence?
Yet no-one would deny that a form of ‘newspeak’, however altered, is all too prevalent.
What part of speech is newspeak?
Newspeak can be a noun or a proper noun.
How do you pronounce newspeak?
Newspeak is pronounced /ˈn(j)uːspiːk/.
What is the plural of newspeak?
The plural of newspeak is newspeaks.

Words near newspeak in the dictionary

  1. newspapers
  2. newspaperwoman
  3. newspaperwomen
  4. newspapery
  5. newspaporial
  6. newspeak
  7. newspeaks
  8. newspeople
  9. newsperson
  10. newspersons
  11. newsplan

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: newspeak (page history and authors); Newspeak (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:

Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: en-au-newspeak.ogg.

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