pipe dream
Pluralpipe dreams
- 1A desire or idea that is unlikely to become real, or a plan that is unlikely to work; something close to impossible.
Critics dismissed the proposed high-speed rail line as a pipe dream.
A decade ago, cheap solar power for every home was a pipe dream, but prices have fallen fast.
Similarfantasy, illusion, delusion, daydream
Note
The fantasy was literal at first: a pipe dream was the vision that came to someone smoking opium, and the phrase began in American English. Today it is a verdict: a plan gets dismissed as a pipe dream or, when circumstances change, declared one no longer, as Modern Railways said in 1962 of British Railways turning a profit. Old English pīpdrēam, built identically, meant the sound or music of a pipe.
- 2To have a desire or idea that is unlikely to come true, or imagine a plan unlikely to work; to dream of the nearly impossible.
Rather than fix the roof, they sit on the porch and pipe-dream of a villa on the Italian coast.
He spent most of his twenties pipe-dreaming about a film career that never got started.
Similardaydream, fantasize, dream
Note
The verb takes a hyphen in every form (pipe-dream, pipe-dreams, pipe-dreaming, pipe-dreamed), whereas the noun stays two words. The hyphen is not fixed, though: Cole Porter's "Around the World in Eighty Days" (1946) sings the -ing form with the two words left open. Spelled either way, it takes no object of its own: you pipe-dream of or about a thing, never pipe-dream it.
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Origins
Formed from pipe + dream, referring to the fantasies experienced when smoking an opium pipe. Old English had a word formed the same way, pīpdrēam, but it meant something different: “the sound or music of a pipe.”
From the noun pipe dream.