Who first coined the term 'surrealism' in 1917?

Guillaume Apollinaire first coined the term “surrealism” in 1917.

The French poet used the word in connection with Parade, a ballet produced by Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes. The ballet premiered in Paris on 18 May 1917, with a scenario by Jean Cocteau, music by Erik Satie and designs by Pablo Picasso. Apollinaire described the unusual artistic combination as a form of “surrealism.”

He had already used the term in a March 1917 letter to the poet Paul Dermée, where he preferred surréalisme to supernaturalism. He later applied it to his play Les Mamelles de Tirésias, first performed in 1917, calling the work a “surrealist drama.”

The word predates the organized movement. André Breton did not coin it, although his 1924 Manifesto of Surrealism helped establish the movement and gave the term its major theoretical meaning. Another historical complication is that Yvan Goll published a surrealist manifesto shortly before Breton’s, but neither Goll nor Breton was the original inventor of the word.