surreal means resembling a dream: fantastic and incongruous. It carries an Arena rating of 1756, earned across 8 head-to-head judged battles.
Among words judged in Lexicurio's Arena, surreal ranks #216 of 17,116 for Words That Escaped Their Books, #578 of 17,123 for Most Malleable Words, #3,004 of 17,120 for Most Beautiful Words, #4,432 of 17,111 for Most Sublime Words.
surreal is pronounced /səˈɹiː(.ə)l/.
Why “surreal” is a great word
Having the disorienting, hallucinatory, or fantastic quality of a dream. A back-formation from surrealism, itself from French surréalisme, from sur- ("over, above") + réalisme ("realism"), first attested in English in the 1930s. Unlike "fantastic" (which suggests the merely fanciful) or "bizarre" (which implies a real-world oddity), surreal describes the unnerving sensation where the world's internal logic has quietly dissolved. It is the melting clock, the airport populated by strangers in postures of exhausted waiting, the familiar face that shifts and blurs—the quiet horror and beauty of finding oneself awake inside a dream, the everyday world suddenly made alien.
adj
- Resembling a dream: fantastic and incongruous.e.g.“surreal picture/sound/art”
Words closest in meaning
By meaning, not spelling — each word's AI semantic fingerprint, nearest first.