Etymology
The word comes from Ancient Greek: δυσ-, "bad, hard", and Ancient Greek: τόπος, "place, landscape". It can alternatively be called cacotopia, or anti-utopia.
The word dystopia represents a counterpart of utopia, a term originally coined by Thomas More in his book of that title completed in 1516.
The first known use of dystopian, as recorded by the Oxford English Dictionary, is a speech given before the British House of Commons by John Stuart Mill in 1868, in which Mill denounced the government's Irish land policy: "It is, perhaps, too complimentary to call them Utopians, they ought rather to be called dys-topians, or caco-topians. What is commonly called Utopian is something too good to be practicable; but what they appear to favour is too bad to be practicable."
Read more about this topic: Dystopia
Famous quotes containing the word etymology:
“The universal principle of etymology in all languages: words are carried over from bodies and from the properties of bodies to express the things of the mind and spirit. The order of ideas must follow the order of things.”
—Giambattista Vico (1688–1744)
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