surreal
adjective
Did you know?
In 1924 a group of European poets, painters, and filmmakers founded a movement that they called Surrealism. Their central idea was that the unconscious mind (a concept Sigmund Freud had recently made famous) was the source of all imagination, and that art should try to express its contents. The unconscious, they believed, revealed itself most clearly in dreams. The Surrealist painters included René Magritte, Joan Miró, and Salvador Dalí, whose "limp watches" painting became the best-known Surrealist image of all. Since those years, we've used surreal to describe all kinds of situations that strike us as dreamlike. And even though the Surrealist movement ended long ago, surrealism now seems to be everywhere—not just in painting, literature, and movies but also in blogs, video games, and graphic novels.
Examples of surreal in a Sentence
Johnna Kaplan, Newsweek, 3 Mar. 2008
Films aren't just a part of life for people in India; they are a way of life. The over-the-top, surreal dance numbers in nearly every Bollywood film often make no sense in relation to the story, but no one seems to be complaining.
—Shashank Samant, The Out Traveler, May/June 2005
The movie achieves a truly rare mix of the absurd, the surreal, and the heartfelt. Improbably, its wacked-out premise and structural hilarity concoct a melancholy meditation on love, loss, and memory, while delivering a message—subversive to our culture's therapeutic optimism—about the tragedy of healing.
—Rand Richards Cooper, Commonweal, 23 Apr. 2004
The whole thing was completely surreal.
Bilge Ebiri, Vulture, 28 May 2025
Using your body to brace doors and windows Those who have been through major hurricanes may tell you of the surreal visual of watching their doors and windows bending to the pressure from the winds.
—Howard Cohen, Miami Herald, 28 May 2025
The loss of swaths of land is just one of the surreal series of events that will occur when the earthquake eventually strikes, researchers say.
—Elizabeth Weise, USA Today, 25 May 2025
Zimbabwe’s cricketers soaked in the surreal scenes, lapping it up in front of their giddy supporters at Trent Bridge in the aftermath of the one-off Test against England.
—Tristan Lavalette, Forbes.com, 25 May 2025
See All Example Sentences for surreal
Cite this Entry
“Surreal.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/surreal. Accessed 3 Jun. 2025.
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