free? or ?intellectually free? since
political and intellectual freedom no longer existed even as concepts,
and were therefore of necessity nameless. Quite apart from the
suppression of definitely heretical words, reduction of vocabulary was
regarded as an end in itself, and no word that could be dispensed with
was allowed to survive. Newspeak was designed not to extend but to
diminish the range of thought, and this purpose was indirectly assisted
by cutting the choice of words down to a minimum.

Newspeak was founded on the English language as we now know it, though
many Newspeak sentences, even when not containing newly-created words,
would be barely intelligible to an English-speaker of our own day.
Newspeak words were divided into three distinct classes, known as the A
vocabulary, the B vocabulary (also called compound words), and the C
vocabulary. It will be simpler to discuss each class separately, but the
grammatical peculiarities of the language can be dealt with in the
section devoted to the A vocabulary, since the same rules held good for
all three categories.



The A vocabulary. The A vocabulary consisted of the words needed for the
business of everyday life -- for such things as eating, drinking,
working, putting on one?s clothes, going up and down stairs, riding in
vehicles, gardening, cooking, and the like. It was composed almost
entirely of words that we already possess words like hit, run, dog,
tree, sugar, house, field -- but in comparison with the present-day
English vocabulary their number was extremely small, while their
meanings were far more rigidly defined. All ambiguities and shades of
meaning had been purged out of them. So far as it could be achieved, a
Newspeak word of this class was simply a staccato sound expressing one
clearly understood concept. It would have been quite impossible to use
the A vocabulary for literary purposes or for political or philosophical
discussion. It was intended only to express simple, purpo