unperson
noun
No English definition recorded for this entry.
L329917 on Wikidata ↗Wiktionary
noun
Etymology: From un- + person. Coined by George Orwell in 1949 as part of the Newspeak in his novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, where it refers to a person who has been executed or has fallen out of favor; whose entire history has been erased.
- A person who has been stripped of rights, identity, or humanity.
“With his identity stolen, he became an unperson, unable to prove his existence to the government.”
“In accordance with the change in the party line, Stalin vanished from the play, disappearing even before Mr. Krushchev's denunciation at the 20th Congress of the Communist Party. Stalin became an “unperson,” in the terminology of George Orwell's “1984”.”
verb
Etymology: From un- + person. Coined by George Orwell in 1949 as part of the Newspeak in his novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, where it refers to a person who has been executed or has fallen out of favor; whose entire history has been erased.
- To strip (a person) of rights, identity, or humanity; to dehumanize.
“Unhappily, shortcomings here on the part of even a few schools provide a handle for the type of irresponsible generalization that recently labeled the lay professor on the Catholic campus "unwanted, unpaid, uncared for and unpersoned."”
“Could a decision in the clinic’s favor today mean that, in that future, the lab-gestated babies would be legally unpersoned, because the womb had been held to impart a worth the child did not have on its own?”