Nineteen Eighty-Four

Big Brother's year

Nineteen Eighty-Four is George Orwell's 1949 dystopian novel depicting a totalitarian surveillance state ruled by Big Brother.

The book gave English lasting vocabulary: Orwellian, doublethink, thoughtcrime, newspeak, memory hole, Room 101.

References to 1984 signal warnings about authoritarian control, propaganda, and the manipulation of truth: That policy is straight out of 1984.

Orwellian

newspeak

Propagandistic distorted language

unperson · memory hole · Room 101 · telescreen · proles · Ministry of Truth · Ministry of Love · blackwhite · Oceania · Eurasia

resistance

Winston Smith

  • JuliaFemale name or coding language
  • rebellionDefiance of established power
  • dissentDisagreement with authority

forbidden love · diary · secret thoughts · samizdat · thoughtcrime · defiance · individuality · human spirit · love affair · hope

surveillance

Big Brother

Totalitarian surveillance authority

  • telescreenBidirectional broadcast surveillance device
  • spiesSecret intelligence gatherers
  • monitoringOngoing observation of something

watching · listening · panopticon · denunciation · informants · scrutiny · patrol · face recognition

dystopia

totalitarianism

State controls everything absolutely

police state · censorship · repression · dictatorship · despotism · thought control · propaganda · indoctrination · conformity · dehumanization

novel

George Orwell

political novel · English literature · twentieth century · postwar · allegory · cautionary tale · banned books · literary classic · required reading · prescient

Categories
Opposites
societal vision

Nineteen Eighty-FourUtopia

Imagined perfect society

utopian fiction · Island · Star Trek · paradise · Eden

relationship to state power

Nineteen Eighty-FourAtlas Shrugged

Objectivist epic novel

voluntary association · free society

truth and information

Nineteen Eighty-Fouropen society

Society permitting free inquiry

free press · Enlightenment ideals · Age of Reason · marketplace of ideas

Family

nineteen, eighty, eight, ninth, ninety, nineties, eighteen, eighteenth, nineteenth

Familiarity
Top 200,000
Profile
Used worldwide · Timeless · Concrete · Negative · Everyday, not technical · Rated PG