Why this word is great
THOUGHTCRIME — [Noun] A crime committed by having unorthodox, unofficial, controversial, or socially unacceptable thoughts. From thought + crime, coined by George Orwell in the novel Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949). Unlike "heresy" (which denotes religious or doctrinal dissent) or "sedition" (which requires overt acts of rebellion), thoughtcrime is the silent specter of internal defiance, the mere possibility of disloyalty etched in the furrows of a brow. It is the unspoken doubt in a dictator’s infallibility, the fleeting sympathy for an enemy in wartime, or the private wish for a different world—each a phantom offense, punishable not for what it does, but for what it might become. The true horror of thoughtcrime lies in its demand: that even the mind must kneel.