Meaning of dystopia in English

dystopia

/dɪˈstoʊ.pi.ə/ uk

/dɪˈstəʊ.pi.ə/

a very bad or unfair society in which there is a lot of suffering, especially an imaginary society in the future, after something terrible has happened; a description of such a society:

The film is set in 2700 on an uninhabitable Earth, a dystopia covered in towers of garbage.

Most of the novels are dystopias in the tradition of Brave New World.

Related word

dystopian

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utopia

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Rapid industrialization led to fears about living in a dehumanized, mechanized dystopia.
In his imagination, his own country is a dystopia, a drunken, unhappy, overcrowded, uncultured nightmare.
Most alternate histories published in English are dystopias, depicting a society that is strikingly worse as a result of the changed outcome.
His literary interests are in futurism and dystopia.

SMART Vocabulary: related words and phrases

Society - general words

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You can also find related words, phrases, and synonyms in the topics:

Feeling sad and unhappy

Related word

dystopian

(Definition of dystopia from the Cambridge Advanced Learner's Dictionary & Thesaurus © Cambridge University Press)

Examples of dystopia

dystopia

But even when the series falters, it treats us to a story that exemplifies the best of teenage dystopia, and transcends the worst.

From The Verge

In its futuristic dystopia, learning is forbidden and books are banned.

From Los Angeles Times

And with everything currently broken in our messy little world, it's probably the least scary of our many food dystopias.

From Gizmodo

The dairies feared the rise of a cheap, oily dystopia, and they decided to take action.

From Slate Magazine

And that leads to a real, in my view, social dystopia that we don't want to approach.

From NPR

American life is often about choosing the lesser of our possible dystopias, even at the dinner table.

From Gizmodo

What began as an often acute and very funny picture of rural dystopia, written in a lively vernacular, ends up drenched in nonsense and sentimentality.

From The New York Review of Books

The alternative to this binary dystopia is to take seriously the differences between an eight-, 18-, and 28-week fetus.

From Slate Magazine

Every generation conjures its own apocalypses and dystopias.

From The New Yorker

It's the usual left-wing game that puts the blame for urban dystopia everywhere but where it belongs, on people behaving badly.

From Washington Times

Literary dystopias are always steeped in the cultural anxieties of their time.

From Slate Magazine

In popular conceptions of dystopia, names are often among the first things to disappear.

From The New Yorker

That is, until an inferior man figures out how to game the system in this under-rated and sleek vision of dystopia.

From Plain Dealer

They're all either light or dark, utopias or dystopias.

From NPR

These examples are from corpora and from sources on the web. Any opinions in the examples do not represent the opinion of the Cambridge Dictionary editors or of Cambridge University Press or its licensors.

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