Utopia (the word, book and place)

 

The word utopia was invented in 1516 by Sir Thomas More. Thomas More was a 16th‑century English humanist, lawyer, statesman, and author best known for Utopia (1516). He served as Lord Chancellor under Henry VIII but refused to accept the king as head of the Church of England. More’s steadfast commitment to conscience and Catholic doctrine led to his execution in 1535. He was later canonized as a martyr. 

The word's etymology is a deliberate linguistic pun built from Greek roots.  It literally means “no place,” but it also sounds like it could mean “good place.”  Built from ou-topos (no place), More coined the term for the title of his 1516 book describing a fictional island society. The "noplace" was More's way of indicating that such a perfect society does not exist. 

16th-century readers noticed that utopia sounds almost identical to eutopia - a good place. The sense was reinforced when the contrasting term dystopia (“bad place”) was coined in the 19th century.

More's Utopia is presented as a traveler’s account of a perfect island society in the New World. But the book is satire, not travel, and a critique of European politics, religion, and inequality. The book’s narrator, Raphael Hythloday, has a name meaning “speaker of nonsense,” reinforcing the satire.

The island’s map and alphabet were also fabricated to deepen the illusion. The word utopia quickly entered English (by 1551) to mean any imagined perfect society, and by the 1610s it was used metaphorically for unrealistic idealism.