Laputa

[luh-pyoo-tuh]

noun

1. an imaginary flying island in Swift's Gulliver's Travels, the inhabitants of which engaged in a variety of ridiculous projects and pseudoscientific experiments.

Other Word Forms

• Laputan adjective

Example Sentences

The first is a labyrinth combining scenes from more Ghibli films than I could count: The orange train from “Laputa: Castle in the Sky,” the bakery from “Kiki’s Delivery Service” and so on.

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Steam did not overtake water and wind as a source of power until after 1830; in Swift’s Laputa, as in eighteenth-century England, steam power did not replace water power but supplemented it.

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The town also had the fortune of resembling a dreamy world depicted in a Hayao Miyazaki anime film, “Laputa: Castle in the Sky.”

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Together, the two set out to find Laputa, an island that Jonathan Swift described as floating above the earth.

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Gulliver describes the aerial propulsion of Laputa in detail, even incorporating a force diagram that would not have been out of place in the Philosophical Transactions.

Read more on Nature