El Dorado
- proper noun
- /ɛl dɔˈrɑːdoʊ/
- Literature
:
El Dorado
- She dreamed of finding her own El Dorado, a place where she could achieve all her goals.
Examples
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After winning the lottery, he felt like he had discovered an El Dorado of wealth that would change his life forever.
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El Dorado is an orange grove!
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They are the secret guardians of the El Dorado oranges.
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Many entrepreneurs view Silicon Valley as a modern-day El Dorado full of opportunities for success.
Synonyms
6
6.2
A place or state where you reach great happiness after effort
4
9.9
An imagined place where people expect to find lots of money and success
2
6.6
An imagined perfect place that exists only in dreams
2
8.8
A made-up perfect place that exists only in dreams
1
7.9
A faraway place of perfect happiness and hope that you cannot reach
1
6.9
A place that exists only in stories or imagination
A very special goal people hope to find after a long search
A hope or plan that sounds nice but is unlikely to happen
Surface Forms
Morphology
El + Dorado
The components are Spanish rather than English — literally 'El Dorado' = 'the golden' — so a learner who knew those constituents could infer an association with gold/wealth. However, the conventional sense as a mythical place or metaphor for an unattainable ideal is a cultural/lexicalized extension that is not fully predictable from the literal parts, making the relation only partially transparent.
Etymology
One popular story says El Dorado began with a 'golden' leader who was covered in gold and led explorers to hope for a land of gold. That's why El Dorado is used today for a mythical place of great 'wealth' or an often unreachable 'goal'.