In its passage from the art world into everyday speech, the word "surreal" has ended up as mere shorthand for the bizarre and the unusual. But it originally referred to something deeper.
Coined by the French poet Guilaume Apollinaire from the words "sur" ("beyond") and "realisme" ("realism"), "Surrealism" was adopted by another poet, Andre Breton, who described it as "thought dictated in the absence of all control exerted by reason, and outside all aesthetic or moral preoccupations," in his "The Surrealist Manifesto" of 1924.
Breton and the other original Surrealists were poets, but their ideas soon emerged in the visual arts, just as the movement spread internationally from its original base in 1920s Paris.