1 . “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. Syme was a philologist, a specialist in Newspeak. Indeed, he was one of the enormous team of experts now ______ in compiling the Eleventh Edition of the Newspeak dictionary.

“How is the dictionary ______?” asked Winston.

“Slowly,” said Syme. “I’m on the adjectives. It’s fascinating.”

He had ______ immediately at the mention of Newspeak.

“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 ______words --- scores of them, hundreds of them, every day. We’re cutting the language down to the ______. The Eleventh Edition won’t ______ a single word that will become obsolete before the year 2050.”

His thin dark face had become animated and his eyes had grown almost dreamy.

“It’s a beautiful thing, the destruction of words. 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 words? A word contains its ______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 ______useless words like ‘excellent’ and ‘splendid’ and all the rest of them? ‘Plusgood’ covers the meaning, or ‘doubleplusgood’ if you want something ______ still. Of course we sue 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?”

A sort of vapid eagerness fitted across Winston’s face. Nevertheless Syme immediately detected a certain ______ of enthusiasm.

“You haven’t a real appreciation of Newspeak, Winston,” he said almost sadly. “In your heart you’d prefer to ______ to Oldspeak with all its vagueness and its useless shades of meaning. You don’t grasp the beauty of the destruction of words. Do you know that Newspeak is the only language in the world whose vocabulary gets smaller every year? Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to ______ 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 ______. Already, in the Eleventh Edition, we’re not ______ that point. But the process will still be continuing ______ you and I are dead. Every year fewer words, and the range of consciousness always a little smaller. Even now, there’s no reason or excuse for committing thoughtcrime. But in the end there won’t be any need even for that. 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?”