Utopia

See also: utopia, utópia, utopía, utopią, and útópía

English

Pronunciation

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Noun

Utopia (countable and uncountable, plural Utopias)

1. Alternative letter-case form of utopia.
   • 1849 March, Charles Kingsley, “The Poetry of Sacred and Legendary Art”, in Sir Walter Raleigh and His Time, with Other Papers, author’s edition, Boston, Mass.: Ticknor and Fields, published 1859, →OCLC, page 206:

     Women ought, perhaps, always to make the best critics—at once more quicksighted, more tasteful, more sympathetic than ourselves, whose proper business is creation. Perhaps in Utopia they will take the reviewer’s business entirely off our hands, as they are said to be doing already, by the by, in one leading periodical.

   • 1932 July 18, William H[enry] Dunphy, quotee, “Anti-Christian War Is Traced to Russia […]”, in The New York Times‎^[1], New York, N.Y.: The New York Times Company, →ISSN, →OCLC, archived from the original on 18 July 1932:

     [I]f it sounds Utopian to say that Christianity can save the world—remember, it is Utopia or hell!

   • 1945, John Laird, The Device of Government: An Essay on Civil Polity, Cambridge, Cambridgeshire: Cambridge University Press, page 115:

     For a long time to come, at least, it is too dangerous an experiment to base on hope. Again they may say that it never could succeed unless in a uchronian Utopia 'above these ruinable skies'.

   • 1962 August, G. Freeman Allen, “Traffic control on the Great Northern Line”, in Modern Railways, page 131:

     As everyone knows, almost all booked passenger and freight trains are diagrammed into rosters for engines and men, and in an operating Utopia everything would work out daily according to plan.

   • 1969, Bryce F. Ryan, Social and cultural change, page 3:

     Whether produced as a Utopia or as a Nineteen Eighty-Four, a condition of changelessness would make man something less than human.

   • 1972, W. G. Fleming, Ontario's Educative Society, volume 3, page 558:

     An examless, gradeless school would have a better social climate; perhaps some would benefit academically. But it is a pure act of faith to believe such educational Utopia is possible.

   • 1974, Kenneth Young, H. G. Wells, Longman Group Ltd, →ISBN, page 44:

     Orwell had correctly seen that the achievement of Wells’s ideas would be far from the frivolity of ‘Utopiae full of nude women’ and visions of ‘super garden cities’.

   • 1978, The Spectator, volume 240, number 1, page 25:

     But the bleakest Utopia of all, the very first of the Unutopias, had come from Wells long before that.

   • 2026 May 13, Richard Wilcock, “High-speed rail: French lessons”, in RAIL, number 1061, page 35:

     So, France does not always get it right. In its march towards a high-speed Utopia, it forgot its regional network and a balance is now needed to be struck.

Derived terms

• Utopian

Latin

Etymology

Etymology tree

Ancient Greek οὐ (ou)

Ancient Greek τόπος (tópos)

Proto-Indo-European *-h₂

Proto-Indo-European *-éh₂

Proto-Indo-European *-i-eh₂

Proto-Hellenic *-íā

Ancient Greek -ῐ́ᾱ (-ĭ́ā)

Latin Ūtopia

Coined by Thomas More in 1516 in his book Utopia, from Ancient Greek οὐ (ou, “not”) +‎ Ancient Greek τόπος (tópos, “place, region”) +‎ Ancient Greek -ία (-ía).

Pronunciation

• (Classical Latin) IPA^(key): [uːˈtɔ.pi.a]
• (modern Italianate Ecclesiastical) IPA^(key): [uˈtɔː.pi.a]

Proper noun

Ūtopia f sg (genitive Ūtopiae); first declension

1. a fictional island, possessing a seemingly perfect socio-politico-legal system

Declension

First-declension noun, with locative, singular only.

	singular
nominative	Ūtopia
genitive	Ūtopiae
dative	Ūtopiae
accusative	Ūtopiam
ablative	Ūtopiā
vocative	Ūtopia
locative	Ūtopiae

Descendants

• → French: utopie (learned)
  • → German: Utopie
    • → Swedish: utopi
  • → Romanian: utopie