Nadsat is a fictional register or argot used by the teenage gang members in Anthony Burgess's dystopian novel A Clockwork Orange.
The narrator and protagonist of the book, Alex, uses it in first-person style to relate the story to the reader.
It also contains influences from Cockney rhyming slang, the King James Bible, German, some words of unclear origin and some that Burgess invented.
The suffix is an almost exact linguistic parallel to the English -teen and is derived from на, meaning 'on' and a shortened form of десять, the number ten.
[3] However, he realized that if he used contemporary slang, the novel would very quickly become dated, owing to the way in which teenage language is constantly changing.
Burgess was later to point out that, ironically, some of the Nadsat words in the book had been appropriated by American teenagers, "and thus shoved [his] future into the discardable past.
In A Clockwork Orange, Alex's interrogators describe the source of his argot as "subliminal penetration".
[5] In Nadsat language a 'fit of laughter' becomes a guff (shortened version of guffawing); a 'skeleton key' becomes a polyclef ('many keys'); and the 'state jail' is blended to the staja, which has the double entendre stager, so that its prisoners got there by a staged act of corruption, as revenge by the state, an interpretation that would fit smoothly into the storyline.