It's Merriam Webster's Word of the Day for October 14th.

Today's word is Utopia, spelled U-T-O-P-I-A.

Utopia is a noun. It refers to an imaginary place in which the government laws and social conditions are perfect. A utopia is a place of ideal perfection. Here's the word used in a sentence from Humans, a monstrous history, by Sirica Davies. Despite the rest of the group arguing with and mostly disagreeing with him for half the evening, my colleagues stuck to his guns.

It would be handy to have robots writing poetry for people, but at the heart of my colleague's provocative position was a utopian ideal,

of a future in which technology was advanced enough to do everything, even write poetry, so that no one needed to work.

Yet this position wasn't convincing either. His utopia sounded more than a little dull,

and nobody wants to be bored out of their minds. There is quite literally no place like utopia.

In 1516, English humanist Sir Thomas Moore published a book titled

Utopia, which compared social and economic conditions in Europe with those of an ideal

society on an imaginary island located off the coast of the Americas. Moore wanted to imply that the

perfect conditions on his fictional island

could never really exist, so he called it Utopia, a name he created by combining the Greek

words, U, meaning not or no, and topos, meaning place. The earliest generic use of the word

utopia was for an imaginary and indefinitely remote place.

The current use of utopia, referring to an ideal place or society, was inspired by Moore's

description of utopia's perfection. With your word of the day, I'm Peter Sokolowski.

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