- utopia (n.)
- 1551, from Modern Latin Utopia, literally "nowhere," coined by Thomas More (and used as title of his book, 1516, about an imaginary island enjoying the utmost perfection in legal, social, and political systems), from Greek ou "not" + topos "place" (see topos). Extended to any perfect place by 1610s. Commonly, but incorrectly, taken as from Greek eu- "good" (see eu-) an error reinforced by the introduction of dystopia.
- utopian (adj.)
- 1550s, with reference to More's fictional country; 1610s as "extravagantly ideal, impossibly visionary," from utopia + -an. As a noun meaning "visionary idealist" it is recorded by 1832 (also in this sense was utopiast, 1845).
- suburbia (n.)
- 1876, from suburb + -ia, perhaps on the model of utopia.
- dystopia (n.)
- "imaginary bad place," 1868, apparently coined by J.S. Mill ("Hansard Commons"), from Greek dys- "bad, abnormal, difficult" (see dys-) + utopia. Related: Dystopian.
- ideology (n.)
- 1796, "science of ideas," originally "philosophy of the mind which derives knowledge from the senses" (as opposed to metaphysics), from French idéologie "study or science of ideas," coined by French philosopher Destutt de Tracy (1754-1836) from idéo- "of ideas," from Greek idea (see idea) + -logie (see -logy). With connective -o- because the elements are Greek. Destutt published his Eléments d'idéologie 1801-1815.
The term ideology did not become widely employed in the nineteenth century, however, and I have not found that Emerson ever used it. It was only after the appearance of Karl Marx's long unpublished The German Ideology and Karl Mannheim's Ideology and Utopia in the period between the world wars of the twentieth century that the term became an omnipresent one. [Lewis P. Simpson, "Mind and the American Civil War," 1989]
Meaning "systematic set of ideas, doctrines through which the world is interpreted" was in use in English by 1907, earliest in socialist and communist writing, with reference to class; from 1918 it came to be used of socialism and communism themselves (along with fascism) and later more broadly still.Ideology ... is usually taken to mean, a prescriptive doctrine that is not supported by rational argument. [D.D. Raphael, "Problems of Political Philosophy," 1970]
- Erewhon (n.)
- "utopia," from title of a book published 1872 by British author Samuel Butler (1835-1902), a partial reversal of nowhere.
- utopianism (n.)
- 1783, from utopian + -ism.
- Shangri La (n.)
- imaginary earthly paradise, 1938, from Shangri La, name of Tibetan utopia in James Hilton's novel "Lost Horizon" (1933, film version 1937). In Tibetan, la means "mountain pass."
