Word.ws English Dictionary

wooden language

wooden language noun: speech or writing that is overly abstract, vague, metaphorical or pretentious in order to avoid addressing salient issues.

Noun

wooden language (uncountable)

  1. (derogatory, informal) Speech or writing that is overly abstract, vague, metaphorical or pretentious in order to avoid addressing salient issues.
    • Of more consequence is the emergence of a phenomen which is perhaps peculiar to the modern world: the phenomenon which the French and Russians call “wooden language,” and which we might call, in honor of Orwell's satire, newspeak.[1990, Roger Scruton, “Ideologically Speaking”, in Christopher Ricks, Leonard Michaels, editors, The State of the Language, University of California Press, →ISBN, page 126
    • Life behind the iron curtain was an education in a certain kind of humour: dark, unsentimental and absurd. It understood that jokes had become shortcuts to the truth – apart from the bonus of laughter, they turned the wooden language of the regime against itself in ways that sincerity could not.2022 May 20, Patrick McGuinness, “Time Shelter by Georgi Gospodinov review – the dangers of dwelling in the past”, in The Guardian, →ISSN

Origin of wooden language

Calque of French langue de bois.

Questions about wooden language

What does wooden language mean?
Wooden language means speech or writing that is overly abstract, vague, metaphorical or pretentious in order to avoid addressing salient issues.
What part of speech is wooden language?
Wooden language is a noun.

Words near wooden language in the dictionary

  1. wooden fishes
  2. wooden horse
  3. wooden horses
  4. wooden kimono
  5. wooden kimonos
  6. wooden language
  7. wooden leg
  8. wooden legs
  9. wooden mare
  10. wooden mares
  11. wooden nickel

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: wooden language (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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