Real means it actually exists — you can touch it, meet it, check it. A real fire and not a picture of one, a real doctor and not an actor in a white coat, real gold that does not turn your finger green.
Real also means genuine rather than fake: real leather, real butter, their real names. It works as an emphasiser too — a real problem, a real friend, a real mess — where it tells you the speaker means it. The adverb is really: you did really well, and real well belongs to casual American speech. In real time, in real terms and real estate are fixed uses worth knowing whole. For real and get real live in conversation, not in an essay.
1adjectiverealActually existing, not imagined or invented.
“She wanted to know whether the monster in the story was real.”
2adjectivegenuineGenuine, not a copy or an imitation.
“The bag is real leather, which is why it costs so much.”
3adjectivenounUsed before a noun to say that something fully deserves the name.
“Getting the visa was a real nightmare.”
4adverbinformalVery (informal, chiefly American).
“The coffee here is real good and it costs almost nothing.”
Too few real examples of this word to estimate which sense is commonest.
Real comes from Latin reālis, 'actual', which is built on rēs, 'matter, thing'. So real means, at heart, thing-ish: made of stuff rather than of talk. It travelled through Old French reel into Middle English, and the root beneath it is a Proto-Indo-European word for wealth and goods.
Middle English
real
English, today
real
From Middle English real. From Middle English real, from Old French reel, from Latin reālis (“actual”), from Latin rēs (“matter, thing”), from Proto-Indo-European reh₁ís (“wealth, goods”). a doublet of realis.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA