There are several reasons why George Orwell’s novel 1984 is titled what it is. The main reason is that the book is set in 1984. Orwell wrote the novel in the 1940s and was imagining that the dystopian setting of the book was what awaited the world in future decades.

In Orwell's time, the year 1984 seemed far away. Given where politics and technological advancements seemed to be going, the thought of ongoing global war made sense, and the threat of totalitarianism was real, particularly in the Soviet Union. Orwell said that he got his inspiration for the book from the Tehran Conference in 1943, in which the Allied leaders discussed how to divide up the world in the wake of World War II. It was a time of great uncertainty and global change. The notion that in forty years a group like the Party could take over a third of the world was not entirely unrealistic.

Orwell finished the manuscript in 1948, so it is possible that the year he was living through inspired him to switch the last two digits to make 1984. It is also interesting that in a letter to his publisher, Orwell mentioned that he could not decide whether to title the novel 1984 or The Last Man in Europe.