Meaning
An imagined place or state of things in which everything is perfect; a scheme or plan that is ideally perfect but impracticable. Register ranges from admiring, for a visionary ideal, to sharply critical, for an impossible dream, and the word names both fictional societies and over-ambitious projects in real life. Tone depends on the speaker: visionary hope in some mouths, a dismissive label for impractical schemes in others. Regional use: General English (coined by Thomas More, England, 1516).
Origin
Sir Thomas More coined Utopia as the name of an imaginary island in his 1516 book, written in Latin, describing an ideal commonwealth. He built it from Greek roots: ou 'not' plus topos 'place', literally 'no place', while deliberately letting it echo eutopia, 'good place', a pun implying that the perfect place exists nowhere. The word was used in English by 1551 (Ralph Robinson's translation) and by the 1610s had broadened to mean any imagined perfect place or scheme. Its family later grew to include utopian socialism (1849) and dystopia, whose non-medical use is traced to John Stuart Mill in 1868.
Research Sources
References used to check this entry’s meaning, history, or documented forms.
Variants
- Utopia (More's island)
- utopian
- utopianism
- utopias
Usage Examples
- The founder described the campus as a utopia where research and craft would blend freely.
- Every generation writes its own utopia, and every generation finds the previous one naive.
- Critics called the city plan a utopia that ignored how much the residents actually earn.