shangri-la

"Shangri-La" is a great song by the Kinks (part of the British Invasion) that ironically points to leisure and material gain as a "paradise" to be aimed for; it is a critique of suburban life before it was fashionable to do so. That said, the term "Shangri-La" is actually credited to James Hilton, British author of the 1933 book Lost Horizon. In the book, the term is the name of a mystical, harmonious valley.

The OED defines it as a term used "to designate an earthly paradise, a place of retreat from the worries of modern civilization." "La" is the Tibetan term for "mountain pass" (OED), but "shangri" is undocumented in both the AHD and OED. The best hypothesis I have is that it is a British author's attempt to create a pseudo-Tibetan word. Wikipedia suggests that "shangri" comes from a Tibetan district called "shang," or that Hilton had heard the term "shambhala," the Tibetan equivalent of "shangri-la" in terms of definition, but could not remember the term.