Duckspeak

noun

noun ·Rare ·Advanced level

Definitions

Noun
  1. 1
    Thoughtless or formulaic speech. uncountable

    "Because his utterances detour through his brain - rather than, as in duckspeak, coming straight from the well-programmed larynx - he has Socratic doubts..."

Example

More examples

"Because his utterances detour through his brain - rather than, as in duckspeak, coming straight from the well-programmed larynx - he has Socratic doubts..."

Etymology

From duck + speak, coined by George Orwell in 1949 as part of the Newspeak in his novel Nineteen Eighty-Four.

Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.