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.
Jessica Lynch, Billboard, 2 Nov. 2025
In my favorite works of his, like A Case for the Existence of God and A Bright New Boise—a play that has its own surreal dynamic with television screens, which play images of hell in the middle of a big-box store—Hunter locates an unnerving mysticism in between the atoms of the hyper-real.
—Jackson McHenry, Vulture, 31 Oct. 2025
But Terrifier 2 mostly uses those details as pillars to prop up one surreal, splattery set piece after another.
—Declan Gallagher, Entertainment Weekly, 31 Oct. 2025
Governors can volunteer their troops to other states, producing surreal scenes like Texas Guardsmen in combat gear arriving at Chicago’s Midway Airport.
—Colleen Hamilton, Them., 30 Oct. 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 Nov. 2025.
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