Merriam-Webster Chooses Its 'Word of the Year': 'Surreal'

Merriam-Webster, the American dictionary company that's been around since 1831, announced Monday that its "Word of the Year" is "surreal." According to its post announcing the choice, surreal was chosen because "it was looked up significantly more frequently by users in 2016 than it was in previous years, and because there were multiple occasions on which this word was the one clearly driving people to their dictionary."

It defines the word thusly: "marked by the intense irrational reality of a dream; unbelievable, fantastic."

Dictionary.com gives a similar definition: "having the disorienting, hallucinatory quality of a dream; unreal; fantastic."

Surrealism is also the name of style of art, which is characterized by realistic depictions of impossible and whimsical events, such as Salvador Dalí's famous "The Persistence of Memory" painting of melting clocks on a beachscape:

In a year when a reality TV star was elected president, defying the predictions of nearly all experts, it's not hard to imagine why the word "surreal" was in frequent use.

But the U.S. presidential election was only the third event that spiked Merriam-Webster's search rate for the word. "Surreal" peaked twice before, in March during the Brussels terror attacks and in July during the attempted coup in Turkey.

"Surreal is often looked up spontaneously in moments of both tragedy and surprise, whether or not it is used in speech or writing," reads the Merriam-Webster post. "This is not surprising: we often search for just the right word to help us bring order to abstract thoughts, emotions, or reactions. Surreal seems to be, for 2016, such a word."

Two other notably election-related words were also finalists for Merriam-Webster's word of the year: "deplorable" and "bigly." Hillary Clinton described a group of Donald Trump's supporters as "deplorables" during the campaign, while Trump repeatedly used a word that interpreters struggled to agree was either "bigly" or "big league." (For the record, it seems he meant "big league" — but the whole debate was itself surreal.)

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