Poet Guillaume Apollinaire first used the term “surrealist” in 1917 to describe Jean Cocteau’s ballet Parade, and the word appeared in his own play Les Mamelles de Tirésias. André Breton, who later founded the Surrealist movement, adopted the term for the Manifeste du surréalisme (1924), and his definition is translated as “pure psychic automatism, by which it is intended to express…the real process of thought. It is the dictation of thought, free from any control by the reason and of any aesthetic or moral preoccupation.” The word surreal became a part of everyday language in subsequent decades and entered the Merriam-Webster dictionary in 1967. The dictionary defines it as “marked by the intense irrational reality of a dream.”
