Surreal means so strange that it feels like a dream. A surreal experience, surreal humour, it was surreal.
It has drifted from the art movement into everyday speech, where it now means little more than very odd. The Surrealists meant something more precise: the world above or beyond the real, reached through dreams and the unconscious.
1adjectivesurrealSo strange that it feels like a dream.
“Meeting my childhood hero at the bus stop was a surreal experience.”
surreal is a quality.
A back-formation from surrealism, coined in French from sur, above, plus real.
Middle English
real
English
real
English, today
surreal
Back-formation from surrealism. A a back-formation from surrealism, equivalent to sur + real. real comes 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