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Title

Brave New World's ironic title derives from Miranda's speech in Shakespeare's The Tempest, Act V, Scene I:^[2]

O wonder!

How many goodly creatures are there here! How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world! That has such people in't!

This line is word-by-word quoted in the novel by John the Savage, when he first sees Lenina.

The expression "brave new world" also appears in Émile Zola's Germinal (1885):

He laughed at his earlier idealism, his schoolboy vision of a brave new world in which justice would reign and men would be brothers.^[3]

and in Rudyard Kipling's 1919 poem The Gods of the Copybook Headings:

And that after this is accomplished, and the brave new world begins

When all men are paid for existing and no man must pay for his sins...

Translations of the novel into other languages often allude to similar expressions used in domestic works of literature in an attempt to capture the same irony: the French edition of the work is entitled Le Meilleur des mondes (The Best of All Worlds), an allusion to an expression used by the philosopher Gottfried Leibniz^[4] and satirized in Candide, Ou l'Optimisme by Voltaire (1759). The German title of the book is Schöne Neue Welt (Beautiful New World). First the word "brave" was translated to "Tapfer", which is the correct modern translation of "brave." Translators later recognized that, at Shakespeare's time, "brave" meant "beautiful" or "good looking".