Thoughtcrime

//ˈθɔːtˌkɹaɪm// noun

noun ·Rare ·Advanced level

Definitions

Noun
  1. 1
    A crime committed by having unorthodox, unofficial, controversial or socially unacceptable thoughts. countable, uncountable

Example

More examples

"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."

Etymology

From thought + crime, coined by George Orwell in Nineteen Eighty-Four.

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