Finally, if you were still wondering what moloko, devotchka and droog mean, they too come from Russian: молоко (milk), девочка (girl ) and друг (friend).

The list goes on with hundreds of Nadsat words, the majority of which are of Russian origin. The top 10 most frequently used words in the book are shown below, and nine of them are of Russian origin. With the help of the Burgess Foundation and bespoke corpus linguistic software, Benet Vincent and his team of researchers were able to access a computer-readable version of the text and extract a list of keywords to analyze the language from A Clockwork Orange. “Viddy” (Видеть) - See WatchĪnd so, if you happened to speak Russian the above sentence would now read: “Our pockets were full of money, so there was no real need from the point of view of stealing any more money to hit some old man in an alley and watch him swim in his blood while we counted the takings and divided by four, nor to do the ultra–violent on some shivering old grey-haired bird in a shop and go laughing off with the till’s guts.” Ptitsa derives from птица (bird) and in this case means “woman,” and smecking comes from смех (laughter). Veck derives from the second half of человек for “human”, here “man.” Viddy comes from видеть and it means to see or watch someone.

Tolchock comes from толчок and it means “push,” here “hit” (but in vulgar slang can also mean “toilet”). Pretty polly rhymes with lolly and so it also means money (in rhyming slang, of course, not in Russian). In the sentence above, there are nine Nadsat terms, eight of which derive from Russian.ĭeng comes from деньги (money). “Our pockets were full of deng, so there was no real need from the point of view of crasting any more pretty polly to tolchock some old veck in an alley and viddy him swim in his blood while we counted the takings and divided by four, nor to do the ultra-violent on some shivering starry grey-haired ptitsa in a shop and go smecking off with the till’s guts.” Take for example this short extract from the first page of the book. So, how close to Russian is Nadsat anyway and can you really understand it if you speak Russian? “Gulliver” (Голова) - Head Their blog Ponying the Slovos is a wealth of information and features a full list of Nadsat words. Together with other academics from Coventry, Birmingham and Heriot Watt Universities, they are looking at how Nadsat can be translated into other languages. It is the rough equivalent of “teen” in English and possibly the best name for a teen speak.īenet Vincent and Jim Clarke are lecturers from Coventry University and members of a research project that studies the use of Nadsat in A Clockwork Orange. It is the English transliteration of надцать, the suffix you add to numbers from 1 to 9 to make eleven to nineteen. In the words of his own characters, Alex spoke a type of “Slav, mixed with bits of old rhyming slang and a bit of gypsy talk too.” “Veck” (Человек) - Man Human That’s when he decided to largely base his Nadsat vocabulary on Russian and other linguistic elements, such as rhyming slang, compound words and archaism thus creating a unique dialect. The dystopian, futuristic landscape that Burgess created for his most famous novel was made only more apocalyptic by the obscure, fictional slang that Alex and his droogs spoke.Īs a polyglot - he spoke a number of Western European languages as well as Malay, Chinese, Russian, Hebrew and Japanese - Burgess knew that using the slang of his time would only make his characters’ speech sound outdated in years to come. Future-proofing a fictional languageĪs the brainchild of keen linguist Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange was always going to be about language to some degree. If you’ve ever tried to decipher their secret dialect only to throw your hands in the air and resort to the incomplete glossary at the back of the book, then you may want to learn more about how this language was created. But here’s another cool reason why you should learn Russian: it can help you understand Nadsat, the cryptic language from A Clockwork Orange. It’s spoken by nearly 180 million people worldwide and its perception as an international language of espionage makes you feel like a character from a James Bond movie. Russian is the language of Pushkin, Dostoevsky and Tolstoy.

Lingo meaning of orange