Utopia

From Wiktionary, the free dictionary
Jump to navigation Jump to search

English[edit]

Noun[edit]

Utopia (countable and uncountable, plural Utopias)

  1. Alternative letter-case form of utopia.
    • 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.

Latin[edit]

Etymology[edit]

Coined by Thomas More in 1516 in his book Utopia from Ancient Greek οὐ (ou, not) +‎ τόπος (tópos, place, region).[1] Compare dystopia.

Pronunciation[edit]

Proper noun[edit]

Ūtopia f sg (genitive Ūtopiae); first declension

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

Declension[edit]

First-declension noun, with locative, singular only.

Case Singular
Nominative Ūtopia
Genitive Ūtopiae
Dative Ūtopiae
Accusative Ūtopiam
Ablative Ūtopiā
Vocative Ūtopia
Locative Ūtopiae

References[edit]