Utopia

How to spell utopia

6 letters · 4 syllables

How to pronounce utopia

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does utopia mean?

1. nounAn imagined place or state in which everything is perfect.

Utopia in a sentence

• The brochure described the resort as a tropical utopia with no crowds and no cost.

• The novel imagines a future utopia where disease and poverty have been eliminated.

Where does utopia come from?

Language of origin: Greek

The word was coined in 1516 by the English statesman and scholar Sir Thomas More as the name of an imaginary island in his Latin book of the same title. He built it from Greek roots: ou, meaning 'not', and topos, meaning 'place', so the literal sense is 'no-place' or 'nowhere'. The joke was deliberate and bilingual: 'utopia' sounds almost identical to a hypothetical 'eutopia', from Greek eu meaning 'good', which would mean 'good place', so More's perfect society is at once an excellent place and a place that does not exist. From the island's name the word broadened to mean any ideal or perfect society, and by the 1600s it was used in English for any visionary scheme of perfection. The spelling trap lives in the smooth ending: the word finishes -pia, not -peia, and the opening 'u' is sounded as 'you' even though it began life as the Greek negative ou.

How the word is built

• u- (from Greek ou: not)
• top (from topos: place)
• -ia (noun suffix denoting a place or condition)