Shangri-la : M-W's Word of the Day

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The Word of the Day for December 7 is:

Shangri-la \shang-grih-LAH\ noun
*1 : a remote beautiful imaginary place where life approaches perfection : utopia
2 : a remote usually idyllic hideaway

Example sentence:
From the air, the city rising out of the mist looked like a Shangri-la, but once on the ground we were besieged by the realities of life in the teeming third-world capital.

Did you know?
In James Hilton's 1933 novel _Lost Horizon_, Shangri-La was the name of a fictional land of peace and eternal youth in the mountains of Tibet. Hilton invented both the place and the name, but over the years people generalized the name and applied it to several real or imaginary locations. In 1942, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt announced that a secret World War II bombing mission had taken off from "Shangri-la" (later revealed to be the aircraft carrier U.S.S. _Hornet_). That same year, FDR also used Shangri-la as the name for the new presidential retreat in rural Maryland -- a spot now better known as Camp David.

*Indicates the sense illustrated in the example sentence.

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