On October 14, 1977, while speaking at an event in Iowa to promote her campaign to roll back anti-discrimination laws protecting LGBTQ people, Anita Bryant is hit in the face with a pie. Bryant was an American household name before she made headlines for her anti-gay political activism. She was the winner of Miss Tulsa […]

Merriam-Webster's Word of the Day for October 14, 2025 is:

utopia • \yoo-TOH-pee-uh\  • noun

Utopia refers to an imaginary place in which the government, laws, and social conditions are perfect; a utopia is a place of ideal perfection.

// It’s a nice place to live, but it’s no utopia.

See the entry >

Examples:

“Despite the rest of the group arguing with and (mostly) disagreeing with him for half the evening, my colleague stuck to his guns: it would be handy to have robots writing poetry for people. … But at the heart of my colleague’s provocative position was a utopian ideal: of a future in which technology was advanced enough to ‘do everything,’ even write poetry, so that no one needed to work. Yet this position wasn’t convincing either. His utopia sounded more than a little dull, and nobody wants to be bored out of their minds.” — Surekha Davies, Humans: A Monstrous History, 2025

Did you know?

There’s quite literally no place like utopia. In 1516, English humanist Sir Thomas More published a book titled Utopia, which compared social and economic conditions in Europe with those of an ideal society on an imaginary island located off the coast of the Americas. More wanted to imply that the perfect conditions on his fictional island could never really exist, so he called it “Utopia,” a name he created by combining the Greek words ou (“not, no”) and topos (“place”). The earliest generic use of utopia was for an imaginary and indefinitely remote place. The current use of utopia, referring to an ideal place or society, was inspired by More’s description of Utopia’s perfection.

By Christian J. Collier