A term you'll meet in George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four.
Newspeak is the official language of Oceania in George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four — a redesigned version of English that the Party is gradually imposing to replace "Oldspeak" (ordinary English) entirely by the year 2050. Orwell appended a short essay, "The Principles of Newspeak," to the end of the novel to explain how it works.
The crucial thing about Newspeak is that it doesn't work by inventing propaganda words — it works by removing words. The Newspeak dictionary shrinks every year. Synonyms and antonyms are deleted wherever a single root word plus a prefix can do the job: "bad" disappears because "ungood" exists. Nuance disappears with it — there is no way to distinguish "excellent" from "very good" from "good," because all the words that used to make those distinctions have been abolished.
The Newspeak word for this design goal is itself instructive: the aim is "duckspeak" — talking without engaging the brain at all — to be possible, and rebellious thought to be impossible, because the vocabulary it would require no longer exists.
Orwell is dramatizing a real, if contested, hypothesis: that the words available to you shape what you're capable of thinking, not just what you can say. If "freedom" and "equality" survive in Newspeak only as Party slogans stripped of their old political content, a citizen literally lacks the vocabulary to articulate certain kinds of dissent — not because it's forbidden, but because the conceptual tools for it have been quietly decommissioned.
"Newspeak" gets applied, sometimes loosely, to euphemistic corporate or political language: calling layoffs "right-sizing," calling civilian deaths "collateral damage." These examples usually substitute one phrase for another rather than deleting vocabulary outright, so they're closer to ordinary euphemism (see our entry on euphemism) than true Newspeak. But the instinct behind the comparison is sound: language designed to make a thought harder to have is exactly what Orwell was naming, whether it shrinks the dictionary or just launders it.
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