Nineteen Eighty-Four

English

Etymology

After Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), a dystopian novel by George Orwell, set in the year 1984.

Noun

Nineteen Eighty-Four (uncountable)

1. A society characterized by rigid government control enforced through propaganda and intensive surveillance.
   • 2008, Ilan Kapoor, The Postcolonial Politics of Development, page 69:

     I cannot help but follow such panopticism to its ultimate conclusion: a Nineteen Eighty-Four scenario.

   • 1999, Gail Fine, Plato Two: Ethics, Politics, Religion, and the Soul, page 265:

     The term 'nuclear family' may be found dislikable, but it is useful in avoiding the suggestion that Plato wants to abolish the family in favour of impersonal institutions of a Nineteen Eighty-Four type.

   • 1995, Peter Parker, Frank Kermode, The reader's companion to twentieth-century writers, page 192:

     Dick's novel condemns this method, because she felt it destroyed creative work and encouraged a Nineteen Eighty-Four atmosphere of fear, and the novel ends with the triumph of hope and a faith in human love.

   • 1970, William Johnston, The still point: reflections on Zen and Christian mysticism, page 171:

     Thus arises again the specter of a Nineteen Eighty-Four, of a brave new world of robots, of a waste land that is ever more sterile, of a West that is sick from lack of mysticism.

   • 1969, Bryce F. Ryan, Social and cultural change, page 3:

     Whether produced as a Utopia or as a Nineteen Eighty-Four, a condition of changelessness would make man something less than human.

   • 1968, Arthur Goddard, Harry Elmer Barnes, learned crusader: the new history in action, page 331:

     Barnes finds an acceleration of the Orwellian trend in American life, and he cites C. Wright Mills' The Power Elite as providing "the best description of the progress made toward a Nineteen Eighty-Four social order in the United States.