Politics & SocietyGreek → English
Dystopia
/dɪsˈtoʊpiə/noun
An imagined society organised so badly that living in it is a punishment.
The Greek roots
δυσ-
dys-
bad, ill, hard
τόπος
tópos
place
Literally: “bad place”
The story of the word
John Stuart Mill threw the word at the government in a Commons speech in 1868, saying its Irish land policy deserved to be called dystopian rather than utopian. An isolated 1747 use has since been traced. The joke underneath is that More's Utopia is οὐ-τόπος, no-place, not good-place; More was punning on eutopia, and dystopia answers a pun rather than a word.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → scientific coinage → English
- First recorded
- 1868
The same roots elsewhere
Other languages reached for exactly the same Greek pieces.
Same family
utopiatopictopographydyslexia
In a sentence
Every second novel on the shelf was a dystopia with the same grey cover.