utopia

plural utopias · plural utopiae · alternative Utopia

1. countableuncountableA world in which everything and everyone works in perfect harmony.

   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.”

   1979, Ian Scott-Kilvert, editor, British Writers, →ISBN, page 242

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   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.

   1945, Chimera: A Literary Quarterly, page 22

   « 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 ».

   1959, Civilisations, page 426

   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.

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

   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.”

   1974, The Chesterton Review, page 262

   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.

   1979, Folk-lore, page 118

   Synonyms: paradise

plural Utopias

1. countableuncountableAlternative letter-case form of utopia.

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

   1932 July 18, William H[enry] Dunphy, quotee, “Anti-Christian War Is Traced to Russia […

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   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.

   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

   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'.

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

   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.

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

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

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

   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.

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