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Uchronia is currently an English word-in-formation, a neologism, that is sometimes used in its original meaning as a straightforward synonym for alternate history,<ref>de Sa, Alexandre F. (2012). From modern utopias to contemporary uchronia. Existential Utopia: New Perspectives on Utopian Thought.</ref><ref>Loyer, Emmanuelle (2019). Uchronia. Booksandideas.net.</ref><ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref><ref>Schmid, Helga (2020). Uchronia: Designing Time. Germany: Walter de Gruyter GmbH. p. 26</ref> a genre of speculative fiction that reimagines historical events going in new, imaginary directions. However, it has also begun to refer to other related concepts.<ref>Schmid, 2020, p. 28.</ref>
In the Spanish, French, German, Portuguese, Italian, Catalan, and Galician languages, the words {{#invoke:Lang|lang}}, {{#invoke:Lang|lang}}, and {{#invoke:Lang|lang}} are native terms for alternate history from which the English loanword uchronia derives. The word is composed of the Greek prefix {{#invoke:Lang|lang}} ("not", "not any", and "no") and the Greek word {{#invoke:Lang|lang}} ({{#invoke:Lang|lang}}) "time", to describe a story set in "no time"; it was formed by analogy with the word utopia, a story set in "no place". It was coined by Charles Renouvier for his 1876 novel Uchronie, whose full title translated into English is Uchronia (Utopia in History), an Apocryphal Sketch of the Development of European Civilization Not as It Was But as It Might Have Been.<ref>Template:Citation, reprinted 1988, Template:ISBN.</ref>
The English word, as a synonym for alternate history, has been applied for example to novels like Philip K. Dick's The Man in the High Castle<ref>Template:Cite journal</ref> and Philip Roth's The Plot Against America.<ref>Template:Cite journal</ref> However, another developing definition of uchronia is a larger umbrella category of fiction that encompasses alternate history, parallel universes, and stories based in futuristic or non-temporal settings.<ref>Worth, Aaron (2018). Uchronia. Victorian Literature and Culture, 46(3-4), 928-930.</ref><ref name="Craveiro"/><ref>Schmid, 2020, p. 11.</ref> Yet another use of the term is for a genre of story rooted in divergences from actual history that originate as more gradual or micro-level changes, in contrast to alternate history, whose divergences have tended to be rooted in sudden and macro-level changes.<ref>Drif, K., & Guilbert, G. C. (2022). What If Golden Age Hollywood Had Been Inclusive?: Ryan Murphy's Hollywood as Queer Utopian Uchronia. In Ryan Murphy's Queer America (pp. 105-118). Routledge.</ref>
Furthermore, the goal of uchronia is sometimes now focused away from the traditional purpose of fiction as mere entertainment instead towards more practical applications in social and political discourse. In this context, it can refer to a re-imagining of a more positive history of a place than the current one, with real-world value in its implications and proposed solutions to social problems.<ref name="Craveiro">Craveiro, Joanna (2016). A live/living museum of small, forgotten and unwanted memories: performing narratives, testimonies and archives of the Portuguese Dictatorship and Revolution (Doctoral dissertation, University of Roehampton), p. 46.</ref><ref>Ramírez Gallegos, René (2020). Uchronia for living well. In Buen Vivir and the Challenges to Capitalism in Latin America. Routledge. p. 174.</ref> Thus, as used by some scholars, uchronia is an alternative or whole new model for sociopolitical thinking, and not simply a genre of storytelling.<ref>Schmid, 2020, p. 26.</ref>