Definitions
American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition
- adj. Having qualities attributed to or associated with surrealism: "Even with most facilities shut down ... a few mavericks managed to slip into the park to sample the almost surreal emptiness before the shutdown ended.” ( Peter H. King).
- adj. Having an oddly dreamlike quality.
Wiktionary
- adj. Resembling a dream: fantastic and incongruous
WordNet 3.0
- adj. characterized by fantastic imagery and incongruous juxtapositions
- adj. resembling a dream
Etymologies
- Back-formation from surrealism. (Wiktionary)
- Back-formation from surrealism. (American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition)
Examples
“Can someone tell me how surreal is realted to Satean, Lucivar and Daemon?”
“And whatever comes beyond surreal is what describes these three men in particular, none of whom has ever been distinguished by his previous tender concern for racial minorities lied upon, denied upon and systematically cheated of their square of the American Dream, telling us '' racism '' is what happens when a Hispanic woman says something dumb about white men.”
“These expose students to hypothetical conundrums involving individuals in surreal circumstances suddenly facing life and death decisions, or present contentious public policy questions and explore the range of respectable progressive opinions for resolving them.”
“How crazy and surreal is it that the Watchmen characters are on the cover of Entertainment Weekly?”
Comic-Con 08 Live: Warner Brothers' Watchmen Panel! « FirstShowing.net
“And as everybody waited for the president-elect to make his speech, after being elected it just became, again I use the word surreal, but it just was a climactic moment.”
“And as everybody waited for the president-elect to make his speech after being elected, it just became, again, I use the word surreal, but it was just a climactic moment.”
“What makes it all a little surreal is that before I start, I log onto Final Fantasy and immediately get tagged by a friend to help him camp a notorious monster.”
“Another element, a subjective one, is if there is a certain surreal, or frankly, weird side to the crime.”
“What then raises this from the bizarre to the surreal is that the initial court reference was made in June 2004 and there was a very detailed preliminary judgement in December 2005.”
“For Jenkins's Storker Project, he dropped "tape babies" in surreal urban contexts.”
Lists
These user-created lists contain the word ‘surreal’.
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WF - list of EN back-formations
Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_English_back-formations
aborigine, accrete, acculturate, admix, admixture, adolesce, adsorb, adulate, advect, aesthete, air-condition, anticline and 212 more...
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Film
jidaigeki, samurai, Kurosawa, action, comedy, drama, Bergman, Buñuel, surreal, rotoscope, melodrama, Cinerama and 333 more...
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Fauvism
Words to describe art of the fauvist movement
wild, beast, color, fauve, fauvism, fauvist, avant garde, floating, violent, outrageous, radical, dynamite and 82 more...
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-eal adj.
marmoreal, ethereal, incorporeal, arboreal, sidereal, funereal, corporeal, venereal, extracorporeal, noncorporeal, purpureal, boreal and 14 more...
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It's All Just Words.
quixotic, penisaurus rex, plibt, pot, polaroid, gemütlichkeit, hey! pooper scoop..., nowhere, anywhere, somewhere, elsewhere, wherever and 80 more...
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Reading 2nd Round
fugitive, hearth, elixir, perpetrator, surreal, tavern, stalk, strut, duress, cavil, intriguing, banister and 10 more...
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Why I adore this site
A collection of words and phrases that keep me coming back for more.
a priori, why I adore this ..., Chrysotus edwadsi, bletted, casu marzu, darner, melittologist, nabob, omne trinum perfe..., pi-stachio, pinnacle of the b..., pseudomantid and 24 more...
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Music lingo
unsyncopated rhythms, tonal harmonies, ambient soundscapes, bass line, synths, mellow, trippy, instrumental, vocal harmony, vamping, tonality, riff and 47 more...
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Words that make my mouth happy
epiphany, serendipity, beloved, treasure, cherish, precious, angelic, etherial, surreal, charm, mystical, wysteria and 1 more...
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Inspiration
These words function as gateways to new spaces that need to be explored.
summon, unfold, unfurl, circuitous, tangent, analogous, propitious, lingering, stagnate, dynamic, pause, layers and 23 more...
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style
film / art visual styles, genres. technical or otherwise.
(art, style, genre, storytelling, visual, communication, technique, randomness)neo-noir, tilt-shift, grindhouse, cubist, musical, dark satire, slapstick, extreme, absurdism, dadaism, post-modernism, pop and 18 more...
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Twitter faves
The new favourite words of people on Twitter.
A script searches Twitter for "X is my new favourite word" and adds it to this list.
See also:
niglets, aw, flakey, shiznit, thatch, sexy, bummers, hotty, eargasms, ratchetry, weird, fab and 457 more... -
favored
visceral, twinkle, whalebone, incandescent, carousel, entangle, brevity, desolate, twirl, deltoid, graceless, tryst and 94 more...
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Just 'cause I like 'em, S
scrunch, solace, sabotage, saccade, sacerdotal, sacrilegious, sacristy, snappy, skew, steadfast, scowl, scorch and 781 more...
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Flutter
tuberose, golden apple, apple cider, unicorn, extraordinary, Pleiades, Merope, speckle, glitter, rose, pitter-pat, whale and 314 more...
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Words I Know
List of most of the words I've learned
garner, abase, abate, abdicate, abduct, aberration, abet, abhor, abide, abject, abjure, abnegation and 1046 more...
Tweets
Looking for tweets for surreal.
fbharjo Soon to be an epic length film " Al Surreel Rithm" (Al Gore didn't invent it!)
- a priori from comments below?!
Mar 21, 2012
seanahan Knuth is an icon. He wrote the Dancing Links algorithm to solve Sudoku several years before the game was invented! Nov 19, 2007
uselessness So you're saying these surreal numbers are really close to real numbers, as in "closer than infinitely close?" Uhm. Nov 16, 2007
reesetee Hey, don't knock caber-tossing 'til you've tried it. Or...you know...watched it. :-) Nov 16, 2007
john Wow. I'm familiar with Knuth--I've read chunks of the Art of Computer Programming and played with
--but I had no idea he wrote, uh... math-based novellas. What can't the man do? Next you're gonna tell me he's a semi-pro tap dancer, and enjoys tossing the caber.
Nov 16, 2007
sionnach Surreal numbers are the most natural collection of numbers which includes both the real numbers and the infinite ordinal numbers of Georg Cantor. They were invented by John H. Conway in 1969. Every real number is surrounded by surreals, which are closer to it than any real number. Knuth (1974) describes the surreal numbers in a work of fiction.
That clears things right up, doesn't it? Nov 16, 2007