dystopian
/dɪsˈtoʊ.pi.ən/
Word Rarity
Rare
Frequency: Zipf frequency 3.19 in modern English
15
Scrabble Score
9
Letters
2
Syllables
9
Unique Chars
Meaning
adj
Of or pertaining to a dystopia.
adj
Dire; characterized by human suffering or misery.
Example Sentences
- "If Suzanne Collins’ novel The Hunger Games turns up on middle-school curricula 50 years from now—and as accessible dystopian science fiction with allusions to early-21st-century strife, that isn’t out of the question—the lazy students of the future can be assured that they can watch the movie version and still get better than a passing grade."
- "In my book Britain has actually worked out how it wants to leave and the EU is preparing a new constitution as a result. The real Brexit is actually much more dystopian."
- "He kept thinking about an episode of “Black Mirror,” the British dystopian anthology series, in which the characters rate everyone they interact with on a scale of 1 to 5 stars. (It doesn’t end well.)"
- "The whole city is immersed in a dystopian-looking smog: urban streets in sepia, emptier than usual, bathed in an eerie quiet."
- "A pioneer of modern AI and Meta’s chief AI scientist, LeCun is one of the technology’s most vocal defenders. He scoffs at his peers’ dystopian scenarios of supercharged misinformation and even, eventually, human extinction."
Etymology
Etymology tree English dystopia Proto-Indo-European *-nós Proto-Italic *-nos Proto-Italic *-ānos Latin -ānus Old French -ainder. Middle English -an English -an English dystopian From dystopia + -an.
Regional Pronunciation
- American English: /dɪsˈtoʊ.pi.ən/
Inflected Forms
more dystopian (comparative)
most dystopian (superlative)