
First edition cover: Chatto & Windus / Wikimedia
brave new world
PRONUNCIATION:
MEANING:
noun: A radically transformed world, situation, or era, especially one with both promise and peril.
ETYMOLOGY:
After Brave New World (1932), a novel by Aldous Huxley. Earliest documented use: 1933.
NOTES:
The world in Huxley’s dystopian novel is technologically advanced, but individual freedom has been traded for stability, conditioning, consumption, and chemical contentment. The future arrives with everything included except the user’s soul.
Huxley took the title of his novel from Shakespeare’s The Tempest, in which Miranda says:
“O, wonder!
How many goodly creatures are there here!
How beauteous mankind is! O, brave new world,
That has such people in ‘t!”