Burgess wrote that the title was a reference to an alleged old Cockney expression “as queer as a clockwork orange”. Due to his time serving in the British Colonial Office in Malaya, Burgess thought that the phrase could be used punningly to refer to a mechanically responsive (clockwork) human (orang, Malay for “person”). It is possible, however, that Burgess invented the phrase as a play upon the expression “a work of pith and moment”.
Burgess wrote in his later introduction, A Clockwork Orange Resucked, that a creature who can only perform good or evil is “a clockwork orange − meaning that he has the appearance of an organism lovely with colour and juice, but is in fact only a clockwork toy to be wound up by God or the Devil; or the almighty state.”
In his essay “Clockwork Oranges”, Burgess asserts that “this title would be appropriate for a story about the application of Pavlovian, or mechanical, laws to an organism which, like a fruit, was capable of colour and sweetness”. This title alludes to the protagonist’s negatively conditioned responses to feelings of evil which prevent the exercise of his free will.