Utopia is a name for an ideal community or society, taken from the title of a book written in 1516 by Sir Thomas More describing a fictional island in the Atlantic Ocean, possessing a seemingly perfect socio-politico-legal system. The term has been used to describe both intentional communities that attempted to create an ideal society, and fictional societies portrayed in literature. "Utopia" is sometimes used pejoratively, in reference to an unrealistic ideal that is impossible to achieve, and has spawned other concepts, most prominently dystopia.

The word comes from Greek: οὐ, "not", and τόπος, "place", indicating that More was utilizing the concept as allegory and did not consider such an ideal place to be realistically possible. The homophone Eutopia, derived from the Greek εὖ, "good" or "well", and τόπος, "place", signifies a double meaning that was almost certainly intended. Despite this, most modern usage of the term "Utopia" assumes the latter meaning, that of a place of perfection rather than nonexistence.

Related terms

• Dystopia is a negative utopia: a totalitarian and repressive world. Popular examples include Yevgeny Zamiatin's We, Ayn Rand's Anthem, Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, Anthony Burgess's A Clockwork Orange, Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451, Lois Lowry's The Giver, Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale, Terry Gilliam's Brazil, and Katsuhiro Otomo's Akira.
• Eutopia is a positive utopia, different in that it means "perfect" but not "fictional".
• Outopia derived from the Greek 'ou' for "no" and '-topos' for "place," a fictional, this means unrealistic or directly translated "Nothing, no matter what". This is the other half from Eutopia, and the two together combine to Utopia.
• Heterotopia, the "other place", with its real and imagined possibilities (a mix of "utopian" escapism and turning virtual possibilities into reality) — example: cyberspace. Samuel R. Delany's novel Trouble on Triton is subtitled An Ambiguous Heterotopia to highlight that it is not strictly utopian (though not dystopian). The novel offers several conflicting perspectives on the concept of utopia.

More's utopia is largely based on Plato's Republic . It is a perfect version of Republic wherein the beauties of society reign (eg: equality and a general pacifist attitude), although its citizens are all ready to fight if need be. The evils of society, eg: poverty and misery, are all removed. It has few laws, no lawyers and rarely sends its citizens to war, but hires mercenaries from among its war-prone neighbors (these mercenaries were deliberately sent into dangerous situations in the hope that the more warlike populations of all surrounding countries will be weeded out, leaving peaceful peoples). The society encourages tolerance of all religions. Some readers have chosen to accept this imaginary society as the realistic blueprint for a working nation, while others have postulated More intended nothing of the sort. Some maintain the position that More's Utopia functions only on the level of a satire, a work intended to reveal more about the England of his time than about an idealistic society. This interpretation is bolstered by the title of the book and nation, and its apparent equivocation between the Greek for "no place" and "good place": "Utopia" is a compound of the syllable ou-, meaning "no", and topos, meaning place. But the homonymous prefix eu-, meaning "good," also resonates in the word, with the implication that the perfectly "good place" is really "no place."'''