Meaning
Oppressively like Orwell's nightmares - surveillance, doublespeak, rewritten history, propaganda that makes lies sound true. The word is both a warning and, its critics say, a worn coin, the most-used author-adjective in English. Serious charge or lazy shorthand depending on the user - best reserved for language corrupted to corrupt thought; Orwellesque is the rarer, broader cousin. Regional use: General English; mid-20th-century literary origin.
Origin
The adjective appeared within a year of Orwell's death: the American writer Mary McCarthy used it in 1950, calling a new magazine a leap into the Orwellian future, and Peter Viereck's Orwellian nightmare-version of the workers' paradise followed the same year. The machinery comes mostly from Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) - Newspeak engineered to make thoughtcrime impossible, doublethink, telescreens, the Two Minutes Hate, and the past rewritten on principle - with Animal Farm (1945) and the 1946 essay Politics and the English Language, where political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, supplying the linguistic half. Its overuse is now a genre: the Times judged it the most widely used author-derived adjective, ahead of Kafkaesque and Machiavellian, and critics from Geoffrey Nunberg to Steven Poole have noted the irony that the word has become the empty aesthetic judgment its namesake attacked. Biographer D. J. Taylor's tighter definition survives the strain: the denial of objective truth, the manipulation of language, and the surveillance society.
Research Sources
References used to check this entry’s meaning, history, or documented forms.
Variants
- an Orwellian nightmare
- Orwellian doublethink
- Orwellian language
Usage Examples
- Renaming the waiting list a capacity opportunity struck the coroner as Orwellian, and she said so.
- The building's Orwellian corridor cameras were, the landlord explained, for the tenants' own comfort.
- Every era relearns the Orwellian reflex: the euphemism arrives one memo before the policy.