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

April 10, 2026 — 4:00pm

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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,........

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