Definitions

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.

  • adjective Having qualities attributed to or associated with surrealism.
  • adjective Having an oddly dreamlike quality.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • adjective Resembling a dream: fantastic and incongruous

from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.

  • adjective characterized by fantastic imagery and incongruous juxtapositions
  • adjective resembling a dream

Etymologies

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition

[Back-formation from surrealism.]

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

Back-formation from surrealism.

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Examples

  • 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.

    Sunday Reading 2009

  • 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.

    Why Liberals Don Peter Berkowitz 2010

  • Can someone tell me how surreal is realted to Satean, Lucivar and Daemon?

    The Shadow Queen - Anne Bishop Nalini Singh 2009

  • 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 2008

  • 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.

    CNN Transcript Jan 2, 2010 2010

  • 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.

    CNN Transcript Jan 3, 2010 2010

  • 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.

    Trifle! wen_spencer 2007

  • Another element, a subjective one, is if there is a certain surreal, or frankly, weird side to the crime.

    Five Easy Questions: Steve Huff, Part One 2006

  • 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.

    Butter wars Richard 2006

  • For Jenkins's Storker Project, he dropped "tape babies" in surreal urban contexts.

    - Boing Boing 2005

Comments

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  • 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?

    November 16, 2007

  • 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.

    November 16, 2007

  • Hey, don't knock caber-tossing 'til you've tried it. Or...you know...watched it. :-)

    November 16, 2007

  • So you're saying these surreal numbers are really close to real numbers, as in "closer than infinitely close?" Uhm.

    November 17, 2007

  • Knuth is an icon. He wrote the Dancing Links algorithm to solve Sudoku several years before the game was invented!

    November 19, 2007

  • Soon to be an epic length film " Al Surreel Rithm" (Al Gore didn't invent it!)

    - a priori from comments below?!

    March 21, 2012