From George Orwell's book Nineteen Eighty-Four, "unperson" is the newspeak term for a person who has been not only killed by the state, but effectively erased from existence. Such a person would be written out of existing books, photographs, and articles so that no trace of their existence could be found in the historical record. The idea is that such a person would, according to the principles of doublethink, be forgotten completely, even by close friends and family members.

The Soviet Union provided real-world examples of unpersons in its treatment of Leon Trotsky and other members of the Communist party who became politically inconvenient. In his article "Pravda means 'Truth'", Robert Heinlein argued that John Paul Jones and a mysterious 1960 cosmonaut had also received this treatment.