Utopia is a name for an ideal community, 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. It is worth noting that 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. Examples: Jack London's The Iron Heel, George Orwell's 1984; Aldous Huxley's Brave New World; Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451, Anthony Burgess's A Clockwork Orange; Alan Moore's V for Vendetta; Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale; Evgenii Zamiatin's We; Ayn Rand's Anthem; Samuel Butler's Erewhon; Chuck Palahniuk's Rant; Cormac McCarthy's The Road; Terry Gilliam's Brazil, 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.

Some questions have arisen about the fact that writers and people in history have used utopia to define a perfect place. Utopia is a perfect but unreal place. A proper definition of a perfect and real place is eutopia.