Meanings
- uncountableThe quality of being surreal.
1 more example
The candidates were undoubtedly prepped about Butte’s economic history (raucous copper-mining town in its heyday, union town, company town, Democratic stronghold), its demographics (white, blue-collar, Catholic, lots of Irish), its decline (drastic population loss, abandoned mines, Superfund site, the Power debacle), the faint sparks of economic hope (a windmill turbine plant, an influx of artists and environmental cleanup folks), its surrealness (that 90-foot statue of the Virgin Mary, looking down from a mountaintop at a denuded landscape dotted with mine mainframes and an abandoned open-pit mine the size of a small county!)
2008 April 6, Deirdre Mcnamer, “How Big Sky Went Dark”, in New York Times
Origin
- Proto-Indo-European*úp
- Proto-Indo-European*upér
- Proto-Italic*super
- Latinsuper
- Latinsuper-
- Old Frenchsur-
- Frenchsur-
- Proto-Indo-European*(H)reh₁-
- Proto-Indo-European*(H)reh₁ís
- Proto-Italic*reis
- Classical Latinrēs
- Proto-Indo-European*h₂el-
- Proto-Indo-European*h₂élisder.?
- Late Latinreālis
- Old Frenchreel
- Middle Frenchreal
- Frenchréel
- Frenchréalisme
- Frenchsurréalisme
- Englishsurrealismbf.
- Englishsurreal
- Englishsurrealness
From surreal + -ness.
Full word history & related roots →Cite this entry
surrealness. (n.d.). In WatkinsX Dictionary. Retrieved November 3, 2026, from https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/surrealness
“surrealness.” WatkinsX Dictionary, https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/surrealness. Accessed November 3, 2026.
WatkinsX Dictionary, s.v. “surrealness,” accessed November 3, 2026, https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/surrealness.
Source: surrealness on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.