uchronia

Uchronia is currently an English word-in-formation, a neologism, that is sometimes used in its original meaning as a straightforward synonym for alternate history, a genre of speculative fiction that reimagines historical events going in new, imaginary directions. However, it has also begun to refer to other related concepts.

In the Spanish, French, German, Portuguese, Italian, Catalan, and Galician languages, the words ', ', and '' are native terms for alternate history from which the English loanword uchronia derives. The word is composed of the Greek prefix ("not", "not any", and "no") and the Greek word () "time", to describe a story set in "no time"; it was formed by analogy with the word utopia, a story set in "no place". It was coined by Charles Renouvier for his 1876 novel Uchronie, whose full title translated into English is Uchronia (Utopia in History), an Apocryphal Sketch of the Development of European Civilization Not as It Was But as It Might Have Been''.