Ecumenopolis

Part of speech: noun

Pronunciation: /ˌɛkjuːmɛˈnɒpəlɪs/

Definitions

1. A conceptual vision of a city that completely covers the entire surface of a planet, merging all individual urban regions into one vast metropolis
2. An idea portraying a singular urban environment enveloping an entire planet, where all cities are interconnected as one massive metropolitan area
3. A theoretical concept envisioning a vast urban sprawl that encompasses the entire surface area of a celestial body, integrating all separate urban centers into one continuous cityscape

Etymology: The word was coined in 1942 by Greek planner Constantinos Doxiadis, who imagined a city that would eventually swallow the whole inhabited Earth. Its first half, "ecumene", comes from the Greek "oikoumene", meaning the inhabited world as the ancient Greeks understood it, and its second half is "polis", the Greek word for city, which is also the root of "metropolis" and "politics". The coinage was a deliberate piece of futurist speculation rather than a description of anything existing. Doxiadis took the classical vocabulary of the Greek city-state and stretched it to cover the entire planet, so that a word built for Athens could describe a single urban mass spanning every continent. Only later did the term escape its original context and begin to be used as a common noun for any scenario imagining urban growth on that scale.