Why does everything feel so surreal? The word that defined a decade

April 10, 2026 — 6:00pm

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Ten years ago, the world changed. It’s hard to pinpoint the moment, but hints lie in the dictionary updates. Blame shock, or uncertainty, or Donald Trump if you must. As it all began late in 2016, the year Trump defeated Hillary despite the forecasts. Since then, a jitter has entered the lexicon.

The tremor is discernible across each house’s word of the year, from fake news (Macquarie) to paranoid (Collins), from post-truth (Oxford) to xenophobia at Dictionary.com. While over at Merriam-Webster, where look-up traffic determines the annual winner, the crown went to surreal.

A decade down the track, surreal has only magnified. Check Google Ngram, where language is charted across digitised books and media, and you’ll see “surreal” climb from a modest 1917 bump to today’s Matterhorn. Proof we can’t get enough of the adjective, but why?

Surrealism – the art movement – registers a meek blip in comparison. Meaning the context for surreal is separate from Salvador Dali’s melting clocks. Yet the dreamlike quality of the master’s images, his lobster telephone, have only firmed the modern grasp of what we deem as not quite real.

Surreal means beyond-real, just as a surcharge is a fee added to the cost, or surname is the name surplus to your first name. Surrealism was coined in 1917 – hence that bump – by French avant-garde poet Guillaume Apollinaire. A fellow bohemian in André Breton, a few years later, drafted the Surrealist Manifesto, defining the movement as “dictation of thought in the absence of all control exercised by reason, outside of all aesthetic and moral preoccupation”.

Breton’s other phrase was “psychic automatism”, the artists relinquishing the helm to their subconscious. Dropping the filter. Gagging the rational critic within. During the same period, Freud wrote his essay Das Unheimliche (literally The Un-Homely), which English has translated as The Uncanny, the eerie tension driven by the familiar in an alien setting, or vice versa. That lobster telephone again.

The internet is threatening the dictionary. Can we still save it?

David AstleCrossword compiler and ABC Radio Melbourne presenter

Crossword compiler and ABC Radio Melbourne presenter

No small fluke that all this talk of surreal and uncanny coincided with The Great War, a time when trauma became the psychic default. Steeples blazing like Dali’s giraffes. Bomb craters and bunkers. Tanks as real as their steel yet somehow separate from how reality was meant to be. A century on, as twin towers fell, surreal only spiked in popularity. Climbing higher in usage and look-up count during the pandemic, rivalling quarantine and apocalypse.

Leading us to 2016, the jitters deepening. Trump’s arrival dealt one shock to the system, coupled by the inroads of virtual reality, as deepfake videos explored the uncanny valley between true and post-true, the real and unreal. Or the surreal, as we often say, using the term as a coded refusal to credit what is actually happening around us.

Young athletes resonate that dissociation, where Sydney Sixer Joel Davies (aged 22) had to pinch himself saying: “It’s pretty surreal playing alongside [Test great] Steve Smith.” Or Newcastle Jet Alex Badolato (21), on being picked as a Socceroo: “It’s a surreal moment. It’s something we’ve all dreamed about.” There it is, the stuff of dreams, and nightmares, the implausible reality where truth is stranger than fiction, yet somehow more surreal than surrealism itself.

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© The Sydney Morning Herald