xanadu
/ˈzænəduː/
Word Rarity
Rare
Frequency: Zipf frequency 2.51 in modern English
14
Scrabble Score
6
Letters
3
Syllables
5
Unique Chars
Meaning
name
The summer capital of the Yuan dynasty, now an archaeological site in Zhenglan, Xilingol, Inner Mongolia, China.
Example Sentences
- "In Xanadu did Kubla Khan / A stately pleasure-dome decree: / Where Alph, the sacred river, ran / Through caverns measureless to man / Down to a sunless sea."
- "A place where nobody dared to go The love that we came to know They call it Xanadu And now, open your eyes and see What we have made is real We are in Xanadu"
- "That's from the poem of the legend of Kubla Kahn's palace in the lost valley of Xanadu! Alph was the river in the legend! Unca Scrooge, this is the road to Xanadu! You've hit the jackpot! The most wondrous valley on earth! The land of milk and honey!"
- "The lyric, as the ideological critics in particular would have it, plays host to a panoply of enticing pipe dreams conjured up by benighted idealists whose visions are doomed in advance to frustration as reality fails, time and again, to ratify their various Xanadus and Byzantiums."
- "I never guessed that when I stumbled into the sheriff's office on a warm August afternoon, I'd met my future. I'd had no dream of finding my own little Eden, my snowcapped paradise, my Xanadu in the Valley of the Sky."
- "“The United States in the twenties was dotted with a thousand Xanadus,” wrote movie-theater historian Ben Hall.""
Etymology
From Mandarin 上都 (Shàngdū, “Upper Capital”). The first Romanized form comes from Marco Polo's writings in Italian as Shan-Du. In 1617, Purchas his Pilgrimage […] by Samuel Purchas was published in London, containing the phrase “In Xamdu did Cublai Can build a stately Palace” on page 472. This was the inspiration for Coleridge's poem which uses the spelling Xanadu.
Word Breakdown
- Root: 上都