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."

From BBC

Never-never land, whatever you want to call it.

From Los Angeles Times

Among Solnit’s less expected forays is a chapter on the allure of Ralph Lauren’s Anglophilic chintz cabbage rose fabrics of the 1980s, which “beckoned from a never-never land of an idealized past, the past of the pastoral and paradise.”

From Los Angeles Times

“What happens when something like this occurs, when a surgical recommendation happens in June, and no one cares, nothing is followed up. It goes into never-never land? . . . It took a court order from me and a threat of contempt to get the record, to get it approved, why did that occur?”

From Washington Post

The fight over Arizona’s Trump-inspired audit of the 2020 presidential election in Maricopa County escalated again this week, with the Republican-led County Board of Supervisors calling it an “adventure in never-never land” and rejecting the Arizona Senate’s demands that more materials be handed over to Cyber Ninjas, the conspiracy-theory promoting audit firm leading the effort.

From Slate