utopia
Language: English
Part of speech: noun
Pronunciation: ipa: /juːˈtəʊ.pi.ə/
ipa: /juˈtoʊ.pi.ə/
rhymes: -əʊpiə
homophone: eutopia
Forms: form: utopia
form: utopias
form: utopiae
form: Utopia
Etymology: From New Latin Ūtopia, the name of a fictional island possessing a seemingly perfect socio-politico-legal system in the book Utopia (1516) by Sir Thomas More. Coined from Ancient Greek οὐ (ou, “not”) + τόπος (tópos, “place, region”) + -ία (-ía). Compare English topos and -ia.
Senses: examples: text: Errors in time must be kept in mind when analyzing myths and utopiae. Utopiae are merely projections, on a less personal and wider scale, of Cinderella’s longing for a happy future.
ref: 1945, Chimera: A Literary Quarterly, page 22:
text: « Some peoples of Central or South Africa have conceived downright utopiae which enable them to build up a reality more tolerable than that in which they have to live daily ».
ref: 1959, Civilisations, page 426:
text: 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.
ref: 1962 August, G. Freeman Allen, “Traffic control on the Great Northern Line”, in Modern Railways, page 131:
text: Efficiency for the sake of efficiency, unchallenged authority conferred upon those who know well a few things and ignore everything else, disdain for the ordinary and humble elements that introduce happiness in our lives, worship of unattainable utopiae, are some of the features of the scheme which leads inevitably to the suppression of the eternal gifts bestowed by God upon every human person and to the frightful prospect of being ruled by what he vividly names “the Empire of the Insect.”
ref: 1974, The Chesterton Review, page 262:
text: 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.”
ref: 1979, Ian Scott-Kilvert, editor, British Writers, →ISBN, page 242:
text: An interesting observation is that folk verses while talking of high standards of morality refer only to precedent generations and not to would-be utopiae, which in fact would rule out the possibility of evolution of a civilization absent before.
ref: 1979, Folk-lore, page 118:
text: According to his model, palace and poetry function in tandem in order to communicate to an audience the ideas of utopiae of power, victory, eternity, and perfection. […] The ruins function, not as an evocation of past civilizations, but as the setting for the poet's dallying and revelry in youthful pleasures; his "noble companions" (probably Christians, given the reference to the length of their hair) are subjugated to the length of their pleasure, a reference to the "stopping of time", one of the utopiae out of which was constructed the licentious world of the khamriyya. […] I believe that these two utopiae are related to a profound consciousness, on the part of taifa royalty and courtiers, of the particular mutability of their reality: […]
ref: 1995, Cynthia Robinson, Palace Architecture and Ornament in the "Courtly" Discourse of the Muluk Al-tawaʻif: Metaphor and Utopia, pages 96, 326, and 582:
text: So in order to conclude, how can we combine all these different aspects of the characteristic cross-relationship of negative and positive utopiae which are to be understood as counter projects to what there actually is?
ref: 2006, Können uns und euch und niemand helfen, →ISBN, page 121:
text: As towns continue to grow, replanting vegetation has become a form of urban utopia and green roofs are spreading fast. Last year 1m square metres of plant-covered roofing was built in France, as much as in the US, and 10 times more than in Germany, the pioneer in this field.
ref: 2013 May 10, Audrey Garric, “Urban canopies let nature bloom”, in The Guardian Weekly, volume 188, number 22, page 30:
glosses: A world in which everything and everyone works in perfect harmony.
wikipedia: Sir Thomas More
Utopia (book)
Synonyms: paradise
Derived terms: sense: Terms derived from utopia
word: anti-utopia
sense: Terms derived from utopia
word: autopia
sense: Terms derived from utopia
word: blacktopia
sense: Terms derived from utopia
word: cyberutopia
sense: Terms derived from utopia
word: dystopia
sense: Terms derived from utopia
word: eutopia
sense: Terms derived from utopia
word: Eutopia
sense: Terms derived from utopia
word: eutopic
sense: Terms derived from utopia
word: gaytopia
sense: Terms derived from utopia
word: heterotopia
sense: Terms derived from utopia
word: infotopia
sense: Terms derived from utopia
word: intimatopia
sense: Terms derived from utopia
word: Jewtopia
sense: Terms derived from utopia
word: pornotopia
sense: Terms derived from utopia
word: privatopia
sense: Terms derived from utopia
word: romantopia
sense: Terms derived from utopia
word: sextopia
sense: Terms derived from utopia
word: technoutopia
sense: Terms derived from utopia
word: techno-utopian
sense: Terms derived from utopia
word: technoutopian
sense: Terms derived from utopia
word: technotopian
sense: Terms derived from utopia
word: unutopia
sense: Terms derived from utopia
word: utopian
sense: Terms derived from utopia
word: Utopian
sense: Terms derived from utopia
word: utopiate
sense: Terms derived from utopia
word: utopic
sense: Terms derived from utopia
word: utopical
sense: Terms derived from utopia
word: utopism
sense: Terms derived from utopia
word: utopist
sense: Terms derived from utopia
word: utopistic
sense: Terms derived from utopia
word: utopographer
sense: Terms derived from utopia
word: whitetopia
Related terms: heaven
paradise