Surreal

How to spell surreal

7 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce surreal

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does surreal mean?

1. adjectiveHaving a strange, dreamlike, or bizarre quality that seems unreal.

Surreal in a sentence

• Walking through the empty airport at dawn felt completely surreal.

• The flooded street, with cars half submerged, looked utterly surreal.

Where does surreal come from?

Language of origin: French

This word traces back to the French surréalisme, a term coined around 1917 by the poet Guillaume Apollinaire and later adopted by André Breton for the artistic movement that prized dreams and the unconscious over ordinary reality. The French built it from sur, meaning 'above' or 'beyond' (itself from the Latin super, 'over'), attached to réalisme, so the whole literally suggested something 'beyond the real'. English borrowed surrealism and surrealist in the 1920s, and the adjective surreal was then back-formed from them, appearing in the mid twentieth century to describe anything with a strange, dreamlike, irrational quality. The 'real' part comes ultimately from the Latin res, meaning 'thing' or 'matter', the same root that gives us 'reality' and 'realise'. The spelling trap lives in the opening: writers must remember a single r after 'sur' and the unstressed first syllable that sounds like a vague 'suh', which tempts people toward 'ser' or a doubled r.

How the word is built

• sur- (above, beyond; from Latin super)
• real (actual, from Latin res 'thing')