Definition of UTOPIAN

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In 1516 Thomas More published Utopia, a description of a fictional island in the Atlantic with an ideal society, in order to draw a sharp contrast with the disorderly political situation of his own time. He created the name from topos ("place") and ou, Greek for "no", since he was well aware that nowhere so perfect was likely to exist on earth. People have long dreamed of creating utopian communities; some of them have joined communes, societies where other idealists like themselves have chosen to live in a cooperative way according to certain principles. Not just communes but plans of all kinds have been labeled utopian by critics. But we can dream, can't we?

Examples of utopian in a Sentence

Adjective

a plan to revitalize the city's decaying downtown that proved to be overly ambitious and utopian

Noun

in the 19th century utopians founded a number of short-lived socialist communities

Recent Examples on the Web: Adjective

This unisex garb would be almost utopian, if the poor souls on screen weren’t so busy battling aliens, asteroids or each other. — Jacob Gallagher, WSJ, "Who Needs Gender? Why Men and Women Are Dressing Identically," 21 Feb. 2019 Such is the case here: a spaceship departs from Earth with the mission to build a utopian civilization on a new world. — Andrew Liptak, The Verge, "Our favorite science fiction and fantasy books of 2018," 21 Dec. 2018 Conventional wisdom insists that single-payer health care, job guarantees, and the like are utopian fantasies; but conventional wisdom also walked the United States directly into historic levels of wealth inequality. — Sarah Jones, The New Republic, "Howard Schultz’s Third Way," 6 June 2018 Once the inspiration for utopian dreams of infinite libraries and global connectivity, the internet has seemingly become, over the past year, a universal scapegoat: the cause of almost every social ill that confronts us. — Steven Johnson, New York Times, "Beyond the Bitcoin Bubble," 16 Jan. 2018 Any token purchase was in some sense speculative, but in the utopian rather than the rapacious sense of the word. — Gideon Lewis-kraus, WIRED, "The Blockchain: A Love Story—And a Horror Story," 18 June 2018 Self-driving companies, once notoriously secretive, gave more information, more rides, and more access in an effort to push forth glowing visions of a utopian AV future. — Alissa Walker, Curbed, "The good, the bad, and the ugly of self-driving cars in 2018," 27 Dec. 2018 Citizens of countries experiencing the recent authoritarian turn still enjoy a range of rights and freedoms and a level of material prosperity that would have seemed utopian in the 1930s. — Zachary Karabell, WSJ, "The Trouble With Hitler Analogies," 30 Nov. 2018 Some, like his utopian vision for Harlem, never came to fruition. — Liz Stinson, Curbed, "Buckminster Fuller made fancy posters for his greatest inventions," 6 Sep. 2018

Recent Examples on the Web: Noun

Then there were all those annoying Tolstoyans—vegetarians, fruit-juice drinkers, utopians of every stripe—her husband encouraged to hang around the house. — Joseph Epstein, WSJ, "Your Spouse Is No Prize? Maybe You Deserve a Nobel," 11 May 2018 For now, the local government seems receptive toward the crypto utopians; the governor will speak at their blockchain summit conference, called Puerto Crypto, in March. — Nellie Bowles, New York Times, "Making a Crypto Utopia in Puerto Rico," 2 Feb. 2018 There have always been plenty of intellectuals and other utopians who ignore this basic truth, of course. — Elliot Kaufman, National Review, "Earth to Senator Murphy: Politics Won’t Solve All of Our Problems," 28 July 2017 Digital nomadism, as an update to both the old hippie trail and get-rich-quick fantasies, unsurprisingly attracts dreamers and utopians, people prone to feelings of betrayal by those who don’t live up to their own ideals. — Benjamin Wallace, Daily Intelligencer, "The Culthopping Twins Who Have Been Evangelicals, Rappers, and Digital Nomads," 12 July 2017 But if the techno-utopians get carried away in their exuberance, Taplin sometimes veers too far in the other direction. — Emily Parker, Orange County Register, "‘Move Fast’ an eye-opening look at real cost of pirated music," 15 May 2017 For years, technologists and other utopians have argued that online news would be a boon to democracy. — Farhad Manjoo, New York Times, "How the Internet Is Loosening Our Grip on the Truth," 2 Nov. 2016

These example sentences are selected automatically from various online news sources to reflect current usage of the word 'utopian.' Views expressed in the examples do not represent the opinion of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback.