Question

surreal In a surreal sequence, the main character gets a job on floor 7 1/2, which turns out to be only half as high as the other floors, so everyone must walk around stooped over. sərˈil

Accepted Answer

Very strange or unusual; having the quality of a dream. In 1924 a group of European poets, painters, and filmmakers founded a movement that they called Surrealism. Their central idea was that the unconscious mind (a concept Sigmund Freud had recently made famous) was the source of all imagination, and that art should try to express its contents. The unconscious, they believed, revealed itself most clearly in dreams. The Surrealist painters included René Magritte, Joan Miró, and Salvador Dalí, whose “limp watches” painting became the best-known Surrealist image of all. Since those years, we've used surreal to describe all kinds of situations that strike us as dreamlike. And even though the Surrealist movement ended long ago, surrealism now seems to be everywhere—not just in painting, literature, and movies but also in blogs, video games, and graphic novels.

word	surreal
definition	Very strange or unusual; having the quality of a dream.
eg_sentence	In a surreal sequence, the main character gets a job on floor 7 1/2, which turns out to be only half as high as the other floors, so everyone must walk around stooped over.
explanation	In 1924 a group of European poets, painters, and filmmakers founded a movement that they called Surrealism. Their central idea was that the unconscious mind (a concept Sigmund Freud had recently made famous) was the source of all imagination, and that art should try to express its contents. The unconscious, they believed, revealed itself most clearly in dreams. The Surrealist painters included René Magritte, Joan Miró, and Salvador Dalí, whose “limp watches” painting became the best-known Surrealist image of all. Since those years, we've used surreal to describe all kinds of situations that strike us as dreamlike. And even though the Surrealist movement ended long ago, surrealism now seems to be everywhere—not just in painting, literature, and movies but also in blogs, video games, and graphic novels.
IPA	sərˈil

Surreal Surrealist Movement Strange Unusual Quality Dream Sequence