Meaning & use
dystopian
Relating to an imagined society in which people lead dehumanized, fearful lives, often under oppression.
See it in a sentence
The novel paints a dystopian future where a single corporation controls all information.
Critics called the film's bleak, surveillance-heavy city a classic dystopian setting.
A note on using this word
Dystopian describes fiction or scenarios, not real ordinary hardship; reserve it for imagined worlds gone badly wrong.
Words with a similar meaning
nightmarishbleak
Choose a synonym to suit the sentence. Meanings can overlap without being identical.
Words with an opposite meaning
utopian
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