- utopia
- 1551, from Mod.L. Utopia, lit. "nowhere," coined by Thomas More (and used as title of his book, 1516, about an imaginary island enjoying perfect legal, social, and political systems), from Gk. ou "not" + topos "place." Extended to "any perfect place," 1613. Utopian originally meant "having no known location" (1609); sense of "impossibly visionary, ideal" is from 1621; as a noun meaning "visionary idealist" it is first recorded c.1873 (earlier in this sense was utopiast, 1854).
- Shangri La
- "imaginary earthly paradise," 1938, from Shangri La, name of Tibetan utopia in James Hilton's novel "Lost Horizon" (1933). In Tibetan, la means "mountain pass."
- suburb
- c.1340 (implied in suburban), "residential area outside a town or city," from O.Fr. suburbe, from L. suburbium "an outlying part of a city," from sub "below, near" + urbs (gen. urbis) "city." Close to crowds but just beyond the reach of municipal jurisdiction, suburbs in 17c., especially those of London, had a sense of "inferior, debased, and licentious habits or life" (e.g. suburban sinner, slang for "loose woman, prostitute"). By 1817, the tinge had shifted to "inferior manners and narrow views." Compare also Fr. equivalent faubourg. Suburbanite formed 1890; suburbia first attested 1896, probably influenced by utopia, originally in England with ref. to London.
"[T]he growth of the metropolis throws vast numbers of people into distant dormitories where ... life is carried on without the discipline of rural occupations and without the cultural resources that the Central District of the city still retains." [Lewis Mumford, 1922]