never-never land

noun

1. an unreal, imaginary, or ideal state, condition, place, etc.

2. any remote, isolated, barren, or sparsely settled region.

Never-Never Land

1. Originally called Neverland, the home of the title character in the story Peter Pan; a place where children never grow up.

Word History and Origins

Origin of never-never land¹

1875–85 never-never land for def. 2; reduplication of never

Idioms and Phrases

A fantasy land, an imaginary place, as in I don't know what's gotten into Marge—she's way off in never-never land. This expression gained currency when James Barrie used it in Peter Pan (1904) for the place where Peter and the Lost Boys live. However, in the second half of the 1800s Australians already were using it for vast unsettled areas of their continent (the outback), and there the term became popular through Mrs. Aeneas Gunn's We of the Never Never (1908). In Australia it still refers to northwest Queensland or northern Australia in general. Elsewhere it simply signifies a fantasy or daydream.

Example Sentences

"It laid bare how incompatible it was to have intelligence services operating in a secret constitutional never-never land and allowed them to become publicly accountable."

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Calling the “audit” an “adventure in never-never land,” Sellers continued: “There was no fraud, there wasn’t an injection of ballots from Asia nor was there a satellite that beamed votes into our election equipment.”

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“The board has real work to do and little time to entertain this adventure in never-never land,” he said.

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So they’re selling cinema on the promise of familiarity, as a never-never land where nothing has really changed and there’s no global catastrophe to reckon with — except for the fictional ones on screen, of course.

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While it’s eventually seen that some of the kids have mobile phones, Taormina purposefully dresses his cast and designs their environment in a way that throws them into a sort of temporal never-never land.

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