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Nineteen Eighty-Four

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English

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Etymology

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

Noun

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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.