With the deep, unconscious sigh which not even the 
nearness of the telescreen could prevent him from 
uttering when his day’s work started, Winston pulled the 
speakwrite towards him, blew the dust from its mouthpiece, 
and put on his spectacles. Then he unrolled and clipped 
together four small cylinders of paper which had already 
flopped out of the pneumatic tube on the right-hand side 
of his desk.
In the walls of the cubicle there were three orifices. To 
the right of the speakwrite, a small pneumatic tube for written messages, to the left, a larger one for newspapers; and in 
the side wall, within easy reach of Winston’s arm, a large 
oblong slit protected by a wire grating. This last was for the 
disposal of waste paper. Similar slits existed in thousands or 
tens of thousands throughout the building, not only in every room but at short intervals in every corridor. For some 
reason they were nicknamed memory holes. When one 
knew that any document was due for destruction, or even 
when one saw a scrap of waste paper lying about, it was an 
automatic action to lift the flap of the nearest memory hole 
and drop it in, whereupon it would be whirled away on a 
current of warm air to the enormous furnaces which were 
hidden somewhere in the recesses of the building.
Winston examined the four slips of paper which he had 
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unrolled. Each contained a message of only one or two lines, 
in the abbreviated jargon—not actually Newspeak, but consisting largely of Newspeak words—which was used in the 
Ministry for internal purposes. They ran:
times 17.3.84 bb speech malreported africa rectify
times 19.12.83 forecasts 3 yp 4th quarter 83 misprints verify 
current issue
times 14.2.84 miniplenty malquoted chocolate rectify
times 3.12.83 reporting bb dayorder doubleplusungood refs 
unpersons rewrite fullwise upsub antefiling
With a faint feeling of satisfaction Winston laid the 
fourth message aside. It was an intricate and responsible job 
and had better be dealt with last. The other three were routine matters, though the second one would probably mean 
some tedious wading through lists of figures.
Winston dialled ‘back numbers’ on the telescreen and 
called for the appropriate issues of ‘The Times’, which slid 
out of the pneumatic tube after only a few minutes’ delay. 
The messages he had received referred to articles or news 
items which for one reason or another it was thought necessary to alter, or, as the official phrase had it, to rectify. For 
example, it appeared from ‘The Times’ of the seventeenth 
of March that Big Brother, in his speech of the previous 
day, had predicted that the South Indian front would remain quiet but that a Eurasian offensive would shortly be 
50 198
launched in North Africa. As it happened, the Eurasian 
Higher Command had launched its offensive in South India and left North Africa alone. It was therefore necessary 
to rewrite a paragraph of Big Brother’s speech, in such a 
way as to make him predict the thing that had actually happened. Or again, ‘The Times’ of the nineteenth of December 
had published the official forecasts of the output of various 
classes of consumption goods in the fourth quarter of 1983, 
which was also the sixth quarter of the Ninth Three-Year 
Plan. Today’s issue contained a statement of the actual output, from which it appeared that the forecasts were in every 
instance grossly wrong. Winston’s job was to rectify the 
original figures by making them agree with the later ones. 
As for the third message, it referred to a very simple error 
which could be set right in a couple of minutes. As short a 
time ago as February, the Ministry of Plenty had issued a 
promise (a ‘categorical pledge’ were the official words) that 
there would be no reduction of the chocolate ration during 
1984. Actually, as Winston was aware, the chocolate ration 
was to be reduced from thirty grammes to twenty at the end 
of the present week. All that was needed was to substitute 
for the original promise a warning that it would probably 
be necessary to reduce the ration at some time in April.
As soon as Winston had dealt with each of the messages, 
he clipped his speakwritten corrections to the appropriate 
copy of ‘The Times’ and pushed them into the pneumatic 
tube. Then, with a movement which was as nearly as possible unconscious, he crumpled up the original message and 
any notes that he himself had made, and dropped them into 
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the memory hole to be devoured by the flames.
What happened in the unseen labyrinth to which the 
pneumatic tubes led, he did not know in detail, but he did 
know in general terms. As soon as all the corrections which 
happened to be necessary in any particular number of ‘The 
Times’ had been assembled and collated, that number would 
be reprinted, the original copy destroyed, and the corrected 
copy placed on the files in its stead. This process of continuous alteration was applied not only to newspapers, but 
to books, periodicals, pamphlets, posters, leaflets, films, 
sound-tracks, cartoons, photographs—to every kind of literature or documentation which might conceivably hold 
any political or ideological significance. Day by day and 
almost minute by minute the past was brought up to date. 
In this way every prediction made by the Party could be 
shown by documentary evidence to have been correct, nor 
was any item of news, or any expression of opinion, which 
conflicted with the needs of the moment, ever allowed to 
remain on record. All history was a palimpsest, scraped 
clean and reinscribed exactly as often as was necessary. In 
no case would it have been possible, once the deed was done, 
to prove that any falsification had taken place. The largest 
section of the Records Department, far larger than the one 
on which Winston worked, consisted simply of persons 
whose duty it was to track down and collect all copies of 
books, newspapers, and other documents which had been 
superseded and were due for destruction. A number of ‘The 
Times’ which might, because of changes in political alignment, or mistaken prophecies uttered by Big Brother, have 
52 19
been rewritten a dozen times still stood on the files bearing 
its original date, and no other copy existed to contradict it. 
Books, also, were recalled and rewritten again and again, 
and were invariably reissued without any admission that 
any alteration had been made. Even the written instructions which Winston received, and which he invariably got 
rid of as soon as he had dealt with them, never stated or 
implied that an act of forgery was to be committed: always 
the reference was to slips, errors, misprints, or misquotations which it was necessary to put right in the interests of 
accuracy.
But actually, he thought as he re-adjusted the Ministry 
of Plenty’s figures, it was not even forgery. It was merely the 
substitution of one piece of nonsense for another. Most of 
the material that you were dealing with had no connexion 
with anything in the real world, not even the kind of connexion that is contained in a direct lie. Statistics were just 
as much a fantasy in their original version as in their rectified version. A great deal of the time you were expected to 
make them up out of your head. For example, the Ministry of Plenty’s forecast had estimated the output of boots 
for the quarter at 145 million pairs. The actual output was 
given as sixty-two millions. Winston, however, in rewriting 
the forecast, marked the figure down to fifty-seven millions, 
so as to allow for the usual claim that the quota had been 
overfulfilled. In any case, sixty-two millions was no nearer the truth than fifty-seven millions, or than 145 millions. 
Very likely no boots had been produced at all. Likelier still, 
nobody knew how many had been produced, much less 
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cared. All one knew was that every quarter astronomical 
numbers of boots were produced on paper, while perhaps 
half the population of Oceania went barefoot. And so it was 
with every class of recorded fact, great or small. Everything 
faded away into a shadow-world in which, finally, even the 
date of the year had become uncertain.
Winston glanced across the hall. In the corresponding 
cubicle on the other side a small, precise-looking, darkchinned man named Tillotson was working steadily away, 
with a folded newspaper on his knee and his mouth very 
close to the mouthpiece of the speakwrite. He had the air of 
trying to keep what he was saying a secret between himself 
and the telescreen. He looked up, and his spectacles darted 
a hostile flash in Winston’s direction.
Winston hardly knew Tillotson, and had no idea what 
work he was employed on. People in the Records Department did not readily talk about their jobs. In the long, 
windowless hall, with its double row of cubicles and its endless rustle of papers and hum of voices murmuring into 
speakwrites, there were quite a dozen people whom Winston did not even know by name, though he daily saw them 
hurrying to and fro in the corridors or gesticulating in the 
Two Minutes Hate. He knew that in the cubicle next to him 
the little woman with sandy hair toiled day in day out, simply at tracking down and deleting from the Press the names 
of people who had been vaporized and were therefore considered never to have existed. There was a certain fitness in 
this, since her own husband had been vaporized a couple 
of years earlier. And a few cubicles away a mild, ineffec-
54 198
tual, dreamy creature named Ampleforth, with very hairy 
ears and a surprising talent for juggling with rhymes and 
metres, was engaged in producing garbled versions—definitive texts, they were called—of poems which had become 
ideologically offensive, but which for one reason or another 
were to be retained in the anthologies. And this hall, with 
its fifty workers or thereabouts, was only one sub-section, a 
single cell, as it were, in the huge complexity of the Records 
Department. Beyond, above, below, were other swarms 
of workers engaged in an unimaginable multitude of jobs. 
There were the huge printing-shops with their sub-editors, 
their typography experts, and their elaborately equipped 
studios for the faking of photographs. There was the teleprogrammes section with its engineers, its producers, and 
its teams of actors specially chosen for their skill in imitating voices. There were the armies of reference clerks whose 
job was simply to draw up lists of books and periodicals 
which were due for recall. There were the vast repositories 
where the corrected documents were stored, and the hidden furnaces where the original copies were destroyed. And 
somewhere or other, quite anonymous, there were the directing brains who co-ordinated the whole effort and laid 
down the lines of policy which made it necessary that this 
fragment of the past should be preserved, that one falsified, 
and the other rubbed out of existence.
And the Records Department, after all, was itself only a 
single branch of the Ministry of Truth, whose primary job 
was not to reconstruct the past but to supply the citizens 
of Oceania with newspapers, films, textbooks, telescreen 
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programmes, plays, novels—with every conceivable kind of 
information, instruction, or entertainment, from a statue to 
a slogan, from a lyric poem to a biological treatise, and from 
a child’s spelling-book to a Newspeak dictionary. And the 
Ministry had not only to supply the multifarious needs of 
the party, but also to repeat the whole operation at a lower 
level for the benefit of the proletariat. There was a whole 
chain of separate departments dealing with proletarian literature, music, drama, and entertainment generally. Here 
were produced rubbishy newspapers containing almost 
nothing except sport, crime and astrology, sensational 
five-cent novelettes, films oozing with sex, and sentimental songs which were composed entirely by mechanical 
means on a special kind of kaleidoscope known as a versificator. There was even a whole sub-section—Pornosec, it 
was called in Newspeak—engaged in producing the lowest 
kind of pornography, which was sent out in sealed packets 
and which no Party member, other than those who worked 
on it, was permitted to look at.
Three messages had slid out of the pneumatic tube while 
Winston was working, but they were simple matters, and 
he had disposed of them before the Two Minutes Hate interrupted him. When the Hate was over he returned to 
his cubicle, took the Newspeak dictionary from the shelf, 
pushed the speakwrite to one side, cleaned his spectacles, 
and settled down to his main job of the morning.
Winston’s greatest pleasure in life was in his work. Most 
of it was a tedious routine, but included in it there were also 
jobs so difficult and intricate that you could lose yourself in 
56 19
them as in the depths of a mathematical problem—delicate 
pieces of forgery in which you had nothing to guide you 
except your knowledge of the principles of Ingsoc and your 
estimate of what the Party wanted you to say. Winston was 
good at this kind of thing. On occasion he had even been 
entrusted with the rectification of ‘The Times’ leading articles, which were written entirely in Newspeak. He unrolled 
the message that he had set aside earlier. It ran:
times 3.12.83 reporting bb dayorder doubleplusungood refs 
unpersons rewrite fullwise upsub antefiling
In Oldspeak (or standard English) this might be rendered:
The reporting of Big Brother’s Order for the Day in ‘The Times’ 
of December 3rd 1983 is extremely unsatisfactory and makes 
references to non-existent persons. Rewrite it in full and 
submit your draft to higher authority before filing.
Winston read through the offending article. Big Brother’s Order for the Day, it seemed, had been chiefly devoted 
to praising the work of an organization known as FFCC, 
which supplied cigarettes and other comforts to the sailors 
in the Floating Fortresses. A certain Comrade Withers, a 
prominent member of the Inner Party, had been singled out 
for special mention and awarded a decoration, the Order of 
Conspicuous Merit, Second Class.
Three months later FFCC had suddenly been dissolved 
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with no reasons given. One could assume that Withers and 
his associates were now in disgrace, but there had been no 
report of the matter in the Press or on the telescreen. That 
was to be expected, since it was unusual for political offenders to be put on trial or even publicly denounced. The great 
purges involving thousands of people, with public trials of 
traitors and thought-criminals who made abject confession 
of their crimes and were afterwards executed, were special 
show-pieces not occurring oftener than once in a couple of 
years. More commonly, people who had incurred the displeasure of the Party simply disappeared and were never 
heard of again. One never had the smallest clue as to what 
had happened to them. In some cases they might not even 
be dead. Perhaps thirty people personally known to Winston, not counting his parents, had disappeared at one time 
or another.
Winston stroked his nose gently with a paper-clip. In the 
cubicle across the way Comrade Tillotson was still crouching secretively over his speakwrite. He raised his head for 
a moment: again the hostile spectacle-flash. Winston wondered whether Comrade Tillotson was engaged on the same 
job as himself. It was perfectly possible. So tricky a piece of 
work would never be entrusted to a single person: on the 
other hand, to turn it over to a committee would be to admit openly that an act of fabrication was taking place. Very 
likely as many as a dozen people were now working away 
on rival versions of what Big Brother had actually said. And 
presently some master brain in the Inner Party would select this version or that, would re-edit it and set in motion 
58 198
the complex processes of cross-referencing that would be 
required, and then the chosen lie would pass into the permanent records and become truth.
Winston did not know why Withers had been disgraced. 
Perhaps it was for corruption or incompetence. Perhaps Big 
Brother was merely getting rid of a too-popular subordinate. Perhaps Withers or someone close to him had been 
suspected of heretical tendencies. Or perhaps—what was 
likeliest of all—the thing had simply happened because 
purges and vaporizations were a necessary part of the mechanics of government. The only real clue lay in the words 
‘refs unpersons’, which indicated that Withers was already 
dead. You could not invariably assume this to be the case 
when people were arrested. Sometimes they were released 
and allowed to remain at liberty for as much as a year or 
two years before being executed. Very occasionally some 
person whom you had believed dead long since would make 
a ghostly reappearance at some public trial where he would 
implicate hundreds of others by his testimony before vanishing, this time for ever. Withers, however, was already an 
UNPERSON. He did not exist: he had never existed. Winston decided that it would not be enough simply to reverse 
the tendency of Big Brother’s speech. It was better to make 
it deal with something totally unconnected with its original subject.
He might turn the speech into the usual denunciation of 
traitors and thought-criminals, but that was a little too obvious, while to invent a victory at the front, or some triumph 
of over-production in the Ninth Three-Year Plan, might 
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complicate the records too much. What was needed was a 
piece of pure fantasy. Suddenly there sprang into his mind, 
ready made as it were, the image of a certain Comrade Ogilvy, who had recently died in battle, in heroic circumstances. 
There were occasions when Big Brother devoted his Order 
for the Day to commemorating some humble, rank-and-file 
Party member whose life and death he held up as an example worthy to be followed. Today he should commemorate 
Comrade Ogilvy. It was true that there was no such person 
as Comrade Ogilvy, but a few lines of print and a couple of 
faked photographs would soon bring him into existence.
Winston thought for a moment, then pulled the speakwrite towards him and began dictating in Big Brother’s 
familiar style: a style at once military and pedantic, and, 
because of a trick of asking questions and then promptly 
answering them (’What lessons do we learn from this fact, 
comrades? The lesson—which is also one of the fundamental principles of Ingsoc—that,’ etc., etc.), easy to imitate.
At the age of three Comrade Ogilvy had refused all toys 
except a drum, a sub-machine gun, and a model helicopter. 
At six—a year early, by a special relaxation of the rules—he 
had joined the Spies, at nine he had been a troop leader. At 
eleven he had denounced his uncle to the Thought Police 
after overhearing a conversation which appeared to him to 
have criminal tendencies. At seventeen he had been a district organizer of the Junior Anti-Sex League. At nineteen 
he had designed a hand-grenade which had been adopted 
by the Ministry of Peace and which, at its first trial, had 
killed thirty-one Eurasian prisoners in one burst. At twen-
60 198
ty-three he had perished in action. Pursued by enemy jet 
planes while flying over the Indian Ocean with important 
despatches, he had weighted his body with his machine gun 
and leapt out of the helicopter into deep water, despatches 
and all—an end, said Big Brother, which it was impossible 
to contemplate without feelings of envy. Big Brother added a 
few remarks on the purity and single-mindedness of Comrade Ogilvy’s life. He was a total abstainer and a nonsmoker, 
had no recreations except a daily hour in the gymnasium, 
and had taken a vow of celibacy, believing marriage and the 
care of a family to be incompatible with a twenty-four-houra-day devotion to duty. He had no subjects of conversation 
except the principles of Ingsoc, and no aim in life except 
the defeat of the Eurasian enemy and the hunting-down of 
spies, saboteurs, thoughtcriminals, and traitors generally.
Winston debated with himself whether to award Comrade Ogilvy the Order of Conspicuous Merit: in the end he 
decided against it because of the unnecessary cross-referencing that it would entail.
Once again he glanced at his rival in the opposite cubicle. 
Something seemed to tell him with certainty that Tillotson 
was busy on the same job as himself. There was no way of 
knowing whose job would finally be adopted, but he felt a 
profound conviction that it would be his own. Comrade 
Ogilvy, unimagined an hour ago, was now a fact. It struck 
him as curious that you could create dead men but not living ones. Comrade Ogilvy, who had never existed in the 
present, now existed in the past, and when once the act of 
forgery was forgotten, he would exist just as authentical-
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ly, and upon the same evidence, as Charlemagne or Julius 
Caesar.
62 19
Chapter 5
I
n the low-ceilinged canteen, deep underground, the 
lunch queue jerked slowly forward. The room was already very full and deafeningly noisy. From the grille at the 
counter the steam of stew came pouring forth, with a sour 
metallic smell which did not quite overcome the fumes of 
Victory Gin. On the far side of the room there was a small 
bar, a mere hole in the wall, where gin could be bought at 
ten cents the large nip.
‘Just the man I was looking for,’ said a voice at Winston’s 
back.
He turned round. It was his friend Syme, who worked in 
the Research Department. Perhaps ‘friend’ was not exactly the right word. You did not have friends nowadays, you 
had comrades: but there were some comrades whose society 
was pleasanter than that of others. Syme was a philologist, a 
specialist in Newspeak. Indeed, he was one of the enormous 
team of experts now engaged in compiling the Eleventh 
Edition of the Newspeak Dictionary. He was a tiny creature, 
smaller than Winston, with dark hair and large, protuberant eyes, at once mournful and derisive, which seemed to 
search your face closely while he was speaking to you.
‘I wanted to ask you whether you’d got any razor blades,’ 
he said.
‘Not one!’ said Winston with a sort of guilty haste. ‘I’ve 
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tried all over the place. They don’t exist any longer.’
Everyone kept asking you for razor blades. Actually he 
had two unused ones which he was hoarding up. There 
had been a famine of them for months past. At any given 
moment there was some necessary article which the Party shops were unable to supply. Sometimes it was buttons, 
sometimes it was darning wool, sometimes it was shoelaces; 
at present it was razor blades. You could only get hold of 
them, if at all, by scrounging more or less furtively on the 
‘free’ market.
‘I’ve been using the same blade for six weeks,’ he added 
untruthfully.
The queue gave another jerk forward. As they halted he 
turned and faced Syme again. Each of them took a greasy 
metal tray from a pile at the end of the counter.
‘Did you go and see the prisoners hanged yesterday?’ said 
Syme.
‘I was working,’ said Winston indifferently. ‘I shall see it 
on the flicks, I suppose.’
‘A very inadequate substitute,’ said Syme.
His mocking eyes roved over Winston’s face. ‘I know 
you,’ the eyes seemed to say, ‘I see through you. I know very 
well why you didn’t go to see those prisoners hanged.’ In 
an intellectual way, Syme was venomously orthodox. He 
would talk with a disagreeable gloating satisfaction of helicopter raids on enemy villages, and trials and confessions 
of thought-criminals, the executions in the cellars of the 
Ministry of Love. Talking to him was largely a matter of 
getting him away from such subjects and entangling him, 
64 198
if possible, in the technicalities of Newspeak, on which he 
was authoritative and interesting. Winston turned his head 
a little aside to avoid the scrutiny of the large dark eyes.
‘It was a good hanging,’ said Syme reminiscently. ‘I think 
it spoils it when they tie their feet together. I like to see them 
kicking. And above all, at the end, the tongue sticking right 
out, and blue—a quite bright blue. That’s the detail that appeals to me.’
‘Nex’, please!’ yelled the white-aproned prole with the ladle.
Winston and Syme pushed their trays beneath the grille. 
On to each was dumped swiftly the regulation lunch—a 
metal pannikin of pinkish-grey stew, a hunk of bread, a 
cube of cheese, a mug of milkless Victory Coffee, and one 
saccharine tablet.
‘There’s a table over there, under that telescreen,’ said 
Syme. ‘Let’s pick up a gin on the way.’
The gin was served out to them in handleless china mugs. 
They threaded their way across the crowded room and unpacked their trays on to the metal-topped table, on one 
corner of which someone had left a pool of stew, a filthy 
liquid mess that had the appearance of vomit. Winston 
took up his mug of gin, paused for an instant to collect his 
nerve, and gulped the oily-tasting stuff down. When he 
had winked the tears out of his eyes he suddenly discovered that he was hungry. He began swallowing spoonfuls of 
the stew, which, in among its general sloppiness, had cubes 
of spongy pinkish stuff which was probably a preparation 
of meat. Neither of them spoke again till they had emptied 
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their pannikins. From the table at Winston’s left, a little 
behind his back, someone was talking rapidly and continuously, a harsh gabble almost like the quacking of a duck, 
which pierced the general uproar of the room.
‘How is the Dictionary getting on?’ said Winston, raising 
his voice to overcome the noise.
‘Slowly,’ said Syme. ‘I’m on the adjectives. It’s fascinating.’
He had brightened up immediately at the mention of 
Newspeak. He pushed his pannikin aside, took up his hunk 
of bread in one delicate hand and his cheese in the other, 
and leaned across the table so as to be able to speak without 
shouting.
‘The Eleventh Edition is the definitive edition,’ he said. 
‘We’re getting the language into its final shape—the shape 
it’s going to have when nobody speaks anything else. When 
we’ve finished with it, people like you will have to learn it 
all over again. You think, I dare say, that our chief job is 
inventing new words. But not a bit of it! We’re destroying 
words—scores of them, hundreds of them, every day. We’re 
cutting the language down to the bone. The Eleventh Edition won’t contain a single word that will become obsolete 
before the year 2050.’
He bit hungrily into his bread and swallowed a couple 
of mouthfuls, then continued speaking, with a sort of pedant’s passion. His thin dark face had become animated, his 
eyes had lost their mocking expression and grown almost 
dreamy.
‘It’s a beautiful thing, the destruction of words. Of course 
66 19
the great wastage is in the verbs and adjectives, but there 
are hundreds of nouns that can be got rid of as well. It isn’t 
only the synonyms; there are also the antonyms. After all, 
what justification is there for a word which is simply the 
opposite of some other word? A word contains its opposite 
in itself. Take ‘good’, for instance. If you have a word like 
‘good’, what need is there for a word like ‘bad’? ‘Ungood’ 
will do just as well—better, because it’s an exact opposite, 
which the other is not. Or again, if you want a stronger version of ‘good’, what sense is there in having a whole string 
of vague useless words like ‘excellent’ and ‘splendid’ and all 
the rest of them? ‘Plusgood’ covers the meaning, or ‘doubleplusgood’ if you want something stronger still. Of course 
we use those forms already. but in the final version of Newspeak there’ll be nothing else. In the end the whole notion 
of goodness and badness will be covered by only six words—
in reality, only one word. Don’t you see the beauty of that, 
Winston? It was B.B.’s idea originally, of course,’ he added 
as an afterthought.
A sort of vapid eagerness flitted across Winston’s face at 
the mention of Big Brother. Nevertheless Syme immediately 
detected a certain lack of enthusiasm.
‘You haven’t a real appreciation of Newspeak, Winston,’ 
he said almost sadly. ‘Even when you write it you’re still 
thinking in Oldspeak. I’ve read some of those pieces that 
you write in ‘The Times’ occasionally. They’re good enough, 
but they’re translations. In your heart you’d prefer to stick 
to Oldspeak, with all its vagueness and its useless shades of 
meaning. You don’t grasp the beauty of the destruction of 
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words. Do you know that Newspeak is the only language in 
the world whose vocabulary gets smaller every year?’
Winston did know that, of course. He smiled, sympathetically he hoped, not trusting himself to speak. Syme bit 
off another fragment of the dark-coloured bread, chewed it 
briefly, and went on:
‘Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to 
narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make 
thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no 
words in which to express it. Every concept that can ever 
be needed, will be expressed by exactly one word, with its 
meaning rigidly defined and all its subsidiary meanings 
rubbed out and forgotten. Already, in the Eleventh Edition, 
we’re not far from that point. But the process will still be 
continuing long after you and I are dead. Every year fewer 
and fewer words, and the range of consciousness always a 
little smaller. Even now, of course, there’s no reason or excuse for committing thoughtcrime. It’s merely a question 
of self-discipline, reality-control. But in the end there won’t 
be any need even for that. The Revolution will be complete when the language is perfect. Newspeak is Ingsoc and 
Ingsoc is Newspeak,’ he added with a sort of mystical satisfaction. ‘Has it ever occurred to you, Winston, that by the 
year 2050, at the very latest, not a single human being will 
be alive who could understand such a conversation as we 
are having now?’
‘Except——’ began Winston doubtfully, and he stopped.
It had been on the tip of his tongue to say ‘Except the 
proles,’ but he checked himself, not feeling fully certain that 
68 198
this remark was not in some way unorthodox. Syme, however, had divined what he was about to say.
‘The proles are not human beings,’ he said carelessly. ‘By 
2050—earlier, probably—all real knowledge of Oldspeak 
will have disappeared. The whole literature of the past will 
have been destroyed. Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Byron—they’ll exist only in Newspeak versions, not merely 
changed into something different, but actually changed 
into something contradictory of what they used to be. Even 
the literature of the Party will change. Even the slogans will 
change. How could you have a slogan like ‘freedom is slavery’ when the concept of freedom has been abolished? The 
whole climate of thought will be different. In fact there will 
be no thought, as we understand it now. Orthodoxy means 
not thinking—not needing to think. Orthodoxy is unconsciousness.’
One of these days, thought Winston with sudden deep 
conviction, Syme will be vaporized. He is too intelligent. He 
sees too clearly and speaks too plainly. The Party does not 
like such people. One day he will disappear. It is written in 
his face.
Winston had finished his bread and cheese. He turned 
a little sideways in his chair to drink his mug of coffee. At 
the table on his left the man with the strident voice was 
still talking remorselessly away. A young woman who was 
perhaps his secretary, and who was sitting with her back 
to Winston, was listening to him and seemed to be eagerly 
agreeing with everything that he said. From time to time 
Winston caught some such remark as ‘I think you’re so right, 
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I do so agree with you’, uttered in a youthful and rather silly 
feminine voice. But the other voice never stopped for an instant, even when the girl was speaking. Winston knew the 
man by sight, though he knew no more about him than that 
he held some important post in the Fiction Department. He 
was a man of about thirty, with a muscular throat and a 
large, mobile mouth. His head was thrown back a little, and 
because of the angle at which he was sitting, his spectacles 
caught the light and presented to Winston two blank discs 
instead of eyes. What was slightly horrible, was that from 
the stream of sound that poured out of his mouth it was 
almost impossible to distinguish a single word. Just once 
Winston caught a phrase—’complete and final elimination 
of Goldsteinism’—jerked out very rapidly and, as it seemed, 
all in one piece, like a line of type cast solid. For the rest it 
was just a noise, a quack-quack-quacking. And yet, though 
you could not actually hear what the man was saying, you 
could not be in any doubt about its general nature. He might 
be denouncing Goldstein and demanding sterner measures 
against thought-criminals and saboteurs, he might be fulminating against the atrocities of the Eurasian army, he 
might be praising Big Brother or the heroes on the Malabar 
front—it made no difference. Whatever it was, you could 
be certain that every word of it was pure orthodoxy, pure 
Ingsoc. As he watched the eyeless face with the jaw moving 
rapidly up and down, Winston had a curious feeling that 
this was not a real human being but some kind of dummy. It 
was not the man’s brain that was speaking, it was his larynx. 
The stuff that was coming out of him consisted of words, but 
70 198
it was not speech in the true sense: it was a noise uttered in 
unconsciousness, like the quacking of a duck.
Syme had fallen silent for a moment, and with the handle of his spoon was tracing patterns in the puddle of stew. 
The voice from the other table quacked rapidly on, easily 
audible in spite of the surrounding din.
‘There is a word in Newspeak,’ said Syme, ‘I don’t know 
whether you know it: DUCKSPEAK, to quack like a duck. It 
is one of those interesting words that have two contradictory meanings. Applied to an opponent, it is abuse, applied 
to someone you agree with, it is praise.’
Unquestionably Syme will be vaporized, Winston 
thought again. He thought it with a kind of sadness, although well knowing that Syme despised him and slightly 
disliked him, and was fully capable of denouncing him as 
a thought-criminal if he saw any reason for doing so. There 
was something subtly wrong with Syme. There was something that he lacked: discretion, aloofness, a sort of saving 
stupidity. You could not say that he was unorthodox. He believed in the principles of Ingsoc, he venerated Big Brother, 
he rejoiced over victories, he hated heretics, not merely with 
sincerity but with a sort of restless zeal, an up-to-dateness 
of information, which the ordinary Party member did not 
approach. Yet a faint air of disreputability always clung to 
him. He said things that would have been better unsaid, he 
had read too many books, he frequented the Chestnut Tree 
Cafe, haunt of painters and musicians. There was no law, 
not even an unwritten law, against frequenting the Chestnut Tree Cafe, yet the place was somehow ill-omened. The 
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old, discredited leaders of the Party had been used to gather 
there before they were finally purged. Goldstein himself, it 
was said, had sometimes been seen there, years and decades 
ago. Syme’s fate was not difficult to foresee. And yet it was 
a fact that if Syme grasped, even for three seconds, the nature of his, Winston’s, secret opinions, he would betray him 
instantly to the Thought Police. So would anybody else, for 
that matter: but Syme more than most. Zeal was not enough. 
Orthodoxy was unconsciousness.
Syme looked up. ‘Here comes Parsons,’ he said.
Something in the tone of his voice seemed to add, ‘that 
bloody fool’. Parsons, Winston’s fellow-tenant at Victory 
Mansions, was in fact threading his way across the room—
a tubby, middle-sized man with fair hair and a froglike face. 
At thirty-five he was already putting on rolls of fat at neck 
and waistline, but his movements were brisk and boyish. 
His whole appearance was that of a little boy grown large, so 
much so that although he was wearing the regulation overalls, it was almost impossible not to think of him as being 
dressed in the blue shorts, grey shirt, and red neckerchief 
of the Spies. In visualizing him one saw always a picture 
of dimpled knees and sleeves rolled back from pudgy forearms. Parsons did, indeed, invariably revert to shorts when 
a community hike or any other physical activity gave him 
an excuse for doing so. He greeted them both with a cheery 
‘Hullo, hullo!’ and sat down at the table, giving off an intense smell of sweat. Beads of moisture stood out all over 
his pink face. His powers of sweating were extraordinary. 
At the Community Centre you could always tell when he 
72 19
had been playing table-tennis by the dampness of the bat 
handle. Syme had produced a strip of paper on which there 
was a long column of words, and was studying it with an 
ink-pencil between his fingers.
‘Look at him working away in the lunch hour,’ said Parsons, nudging Winston. ‘Keenness, eh? What’s that you’ve 
got there, old boy? Something a bit too brainy for me, I expect. Smith, old boy, I’ll tell you why I’m chasing you. It’s 
that sub you forgot to give me.’
‘Which sub is that?’ said Winston, automatically feeling for money. About a quarter of one’s salary had to be 
earmarked for voluntary subscriptions, which were so numerous that it was difficult to keep track of them.
‘For Hate Week. You know—the house-by-house fund. 
I’m treasurer for our block. We’re making an all-out effort—
going to put on a tremendous show. I tell you, it won’t be my 
fault if old Victory Mansions doesn’t have the biggest outfit 
of flags in the whole street. Two dollars you promised me.’
Winston found and handed over two creased and filthy 
notes, which Parsons entered in a small notebook, in the 
neat handwriting of the illiterate.
‘By the way, old boy,’ he said. ‘I hear that little beggar of 
mine let fly at you with his catapult yesterday. I gave him 
a good dressing-down for it. In fact I told him I’d take the 
catapult away if he does it again.’
‘I think he was a little upset at not going to the execution,’ 
said Winston.
‘Ah, well—what I mean to say, shows the right spirit, 
doesn’t it? Mischievous little beggars they are, both of them, 
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but talk about keenness! All they think about is the Spies, 
and the war, of course. D’you know what that little girl of 
mine did last Saturday, when her troop was on a hike out 
Berkhamsted way? She got two other girls to go with her, 
slipped off from the hike, and spent the whole afternoon 
following a strange man. They kept on his tail for two hours, 
right through the woods, and then, when they got into Amersham, handed him over to the patrols.’
‘What did they do that for?’ said Winston, somewhat taken aback. Parsons went on triumphantly:
‘My kid made sure he was some kind of enemy agent—
might have been dropped by parachute, for instance. But 
here’s the point, old boy. What do you think put her on to 
him in the first place? She spotted he was wearing a funny 
kind of shoes—said she’d never seen anyone wearing shoes 
like that before. So the chances were he was a foreigner. 
Pretty smart for a nipper of seven, eh?’
‘What happened to the man?’ said Winston.
‘Ah, that I couldn’t say, of course. But I wouldn’t be altogether surprised if——’ Parsons made the motion of aiming 
a rifle, and clicked his tongue for the explosion.
‘Good,’ said Syme abstractedly, without looking up from 
his strip of paper.
‘Of course we can’t afford to take chances,’ agreed Winston dutifully.
‘What I mean to say, there is a war on,’ said Parsons.
As though in confirmation of this, a trumpet call floated from the telescreen just above their heads. However, it 
was not the proclamation of a military victory this time, but 
74 198
merely an announcement from the Ministry of Plenty.
‘Comrades!’ cried an eager youthful voice. ‘Attention, 
comrades! We have glorious news for you. We have won the 
battle for production! Returns now completed of the output 
of all classes of consumption goods show that the standard 
of living has risen by no less than 20 per cent over the past 
year. All over Oceania this morning there were irrepressible 
spontaneous demonstrations when workers marched out of 
factories and offices and paraded through the streets with 
banners voicing their gratitude to Big Brother for the new, 
happy life which his wise leadership has bestowed upon us. 
Here are some of the completed figures. Foodstuffs——’
The phrase ‘our new, happy life’ recurred several times. It 
had been a favourite of late with the Ministry of Plenty. Parsons, his attention caught by the trumpet call, sat listening 
with a sort of gaping solemnity, a sort of edified boredom. 
He could not follow the figures, but he was aware that they 
were in some way a cause for satisfaction. He had lugged out 
a huge and filthy pipe which was already half full of charred 
tobacco. With the tobacco ration at 100 grammes a week it 
was seldom possible to fill a pipe to the top. Winston was 
smoking a Victory Cigarette which he held carefully horizontal. The new ration did not start till tomorrow and he 
had only four cigarettes left. For the moment he had shut his 
ears to the remoter noises and was listening to the stuff that 
streamed out of the telescreen. It appeared that there had 
even been demonstrations to thank Big Brother for raising 
the chocolate ration to twenty grammes a week. And only 
yesterday, he reflected, it had been announced that the ra-
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tion was to be REDUCED to twenty grammes a week. Was it 
possible that they could swallow that, after only twenty-four 
hours? Yes, they swallowed it. Parsons swallowed it easily, 
with the stupidity of an animal. The eyeless creature at the 
other table swallowed it fanatically, passionately, with a furious desire to track down, denounce, and vaporize anyone 
who should suggest that last week the ration had been thirty 
grammes. Syme, too—in some more complex way, involving doublethink, Syme swallowed it. Was he, then, ALONE 
in the possession of a memory?
The fabulous statistics continued to pour out of the telescreen. As compared with last year there was more food, 
more clothes, more houses, more furniture, more cooking-pots, more fuel, more ships, more helicopters, more 
books, more babies—more of everything except disease, 
crime, and insanity. Year by year and minute by minute, 
everybody and everything was whizzing rapidly upwards. 
As Syme had done earlier Winston had taken up his spoon 
and was dabbling in the pale-coloured gravy that dribbled 
across the table, drawing a long streak of it out into a pattern. He meditated resentfully on the physical texture of 
life. Had it always been like this? Had food always tasted 
like this? He looked round the canteen. A low-ceilinged, 
crowded room, its walls grimy from the contact of innumerable bodies; battered metal tables and chairs, placed 
so close together that you sat with elbows touching; bent 
spoons, dented trays, coarse white mugs; all surfaces greasy, 
grime in every crack; and a sourish, composite smell of bad 
gin and bad coffee and metallic stew and dirty clothes. Al-
76 19
ways in your stomach and in your skin there was a sort of 
protest, a feeling that you had been cheated of something 
that you had a right to. It was true that he had no memories 
of anything greatly different. In any time that he could accurately remember, there had never been quite enough to 
eat, one had never had socks or underclothes that were not 
full of holes, furniture had always been battered and rickety, 
rooms underheated, tube trains crowded, houses falling to 
pieces, bread dark-coloured, tea a rarity, coffee filthy-tasting, cigarettes insufficient—nothing cheap and plentiful 
except synthetic gin. And though, of course, it grew worse 
as one’s body aged, was it not a sign that this was NOT the 
natural order of things, if one’s heart sickened at the discomfort and dirt and scarcity, the interminable winters, the 
stickiness of one’s socks, the lifts that never worked, the 
cold water, the gritty soap, the cigarettes that came to pieces, the food with its strange evil tastes? Why should one feel 
it to be intolerable unless one had some kind of ancestral 
memory that things had once been different?
He looked round the canteen again. Nearly everyone was 
ugly, and would still have been ugly even if dressed otherwise than in the uniform blue overalls. On the far side of the 
room, sitting at a table alone, a small, curiously beetle-like 
man was drinking a cup of coffee, his little eyes darting suspicious glances from side to side. How easy it was, thought 
Winston, if you did not look about you, to believe that the 
physical type set up by the Party as an ideal—tall muscular youths and deep-bosomed maidens, blond-haired, vital, 
sunburnt, carefree—existed and even predominated. Ac-
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tually, so far as he could judge, the majority of people in 
Airstrip One were small, dark, and ill-favoured. It was curious how that beetle-like type proliferated in the Ministries: 
little dumpy men, growing stout very early in life, with 
short legs, swift scuttling movements, and fat inscrutable 
faces with very small eyes. It was the type that seemed to 
flourish best under the dominion of the Party.
The announcement from the Ministry of Plenty ended 
on another trumpet call and gave way to tinny music. Parsons, stirred to vague enthusiasm by the bombardment of 
figures, took his pipe out of his mouth.
‘The Ministry of Plenty’s certainly done a good job this 
year,’ he said with a knowing shake of his head. ‘By the way, 
Smith old boy, I suppose you haven’t got any razor blades 
you can let me have?’
‘Not one,’ said Winston. ‘I’ve been using the same blade 
for six weeks myself.’
‘Ah, well—just thought I’d ask you, old boy.’
‘Sorry,’ said Winston.
The quacking voice from the next table, temporarily silenced during the Ministry’s announcement, had started up 
again, as loud as ever. For some reason Winston suddenly 
found himself thinking of Mrs Parsons, with her wispy hair 
and the dust in the creases of her face. Within two years 
those children would be denouncing her to the Thought 
Police. Mrs Parsons would be vaporized. Syme would be 
vaporized. Winston would be vaporized. O’Brien would 
be vaporized. Parsons, on the other hand, would never be 
vaporized. The eyeless creature with the quacking voice 
78 198
would never be vaporized. The little beetle-like men who 
scuttle so nimbly through the labyrinthine corridors of 
Ministries they, too, would never be vaporized. And the girl 
with dark hair, the girl from the Fiction Department—she 
would never be vaporized either. It seemed to him that he 
knew instinctively who would survive and who would perish: though just what it was that made for survival, it was 
not easy to say.
At this moment he was dragged out of his reverie with 
a violent jerk. The girl at the next table had turned partly 
round and was looking at him. It was the girl with dark hair. 
She was looking at him in a sidelong way, but with curious 
intensity. The instant she caught his eye she looked away 
again.
The sweat started out on Winston’s backbone. A horrible pang of terror went through him. It was gone almost at 
once, but it left a sort of nagging uneasiness behind. Why 
was she watching him? Why did she keep following him 
about? Unfortunately he could not remember whether she 
had already been at the table when he arrived, or had come 
there afterwards. But yesterday, at any rate, during the Two 
Minutes Hate, she had sat immediately behind him when 
there was no apparent need to do so. Quite likely her real 
object had been to listen to him and make sure whether he 
was shouting loudly enough.
His earlier thought returned to him: probably she was 
not actually a member of the Thought Police, but then it 
was precisely the amateur spy who was the greatest danger 
of all. He did not know how long she had been looking at 
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him, but perhaps for as much as five minutes, and it was 
possible that his features had not been perfectly under control. It was terribly dangerous to let your thoughts wander 
when you were in any public place or within range of a telescreen. The smallest thing could give you away. A nervous 
tic, an unconscious look of anxiety, a habit of muttering to 
yourself—anything that carried with it the suggestion of 
abnormality, of having something to hide. In any case, to 
wear an improper expression on your face (to look incredulous when a victory was announced, for example) was itself 
a punishable offence. There was even a word for it in Newspeak: FACECRIME, it was called.
The girl had turned her back on him again. Perhaps after 
all she was not really following him about, perhaps it was 
coincidence that she had sat so close to him two days running. His cigarette had gone out, and he laid it carefully on 
the edge of the table. He would finish smoking it after work, 
if he could keep the tobacco in it. Quite likely the person 
at the next table was a spy of the Thought Police, and quite 
likely he would be in the cellars of the Ministry of Love 
within three days, but a cigarette end must not be wasted. 
Syme had folded up his strip of paper and stowed it away in 
his pocket. Parsons had begun talking again.
‘Did I ever tell you, old boy,’ he said, chuckling round the 
stem of his pipe, ‘about the time when those two nippers 
of mine set fire to the old market-woman’s skirt because 
they saw her wrapping up sausages in a poster of B.B.? 
Sneaked up behind her and set fire to it with a box of matches. Burned her quite badly, I believe. Little beggars, eh? But 
80 1984
keen as mustard! That’s a first-rate training they give them 
in the Spies nowadays—better than in my day, even. What 
d’you think’s the latest thing they’ve served them out with? 
Ear trumpets for listening through keyholes! My little girl 
brought one home the other night—tried it out on our sitting-room door, and reckoned she could hear twice as much 
as with her ear to the hole. Of course it’s only a toy, mind 
you. Still, gives ‘em the right idea, eh?’
At this moment the telescreen let out a piercing whistle. 
It was the signal to return to work. All three men sprang to 
their feet to join in the struggle round the lifts, and the remaining tobacco fell out of Winston’s cigarette. Can you retell in 700 simple words