There were also smaller spikes, including after the death of Prince in April at age 57 and after the June shootings at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Florida.

Irony mixed with the surreal for yet another bump after the March death of Garry Shandling. His first sitcom, It's Garry Shandling's Show, premiered on Showtime in 1986 and had him busting through the fourth wall, speaking directly to the audience and mimicking his real life as a standup comedian, but one who knew he was starring in a TV show.

"It was surreal and it's connected to the actual original meaning of surreal, which is to say it comes from Surrealism, the artistic movement of the early 20th century," Sokolowski says.

Which is to say that "surreal" didn't exist as a word until around 1924, after a group of European poets, painters and filmmakers founded a movement they called Surrealism. They sought to access the truths of the unconscious mind by breaking down rational thought.

It wasn't until 1937 that "surreal" began to exist on its own, says Sokolowski, who is a lexicographer.

Merriam-Webster first started tracking lookup trends in 1996, when the dictionary landed online. In 2001, after the 9/11 terror attacks, the Springfield, Massachusetts-based company noticed plenty of spikes in word lookups. The most enduring spike was for "surreal," pointing to a broader meaning and greater usage, Sokolowski says.

"We noticed the same thing after the Newtown shootings, after the Boston Marathon bombings, after Robin Williams' suicide," he says. "Surreal has become this sort of word that people seek in moments of great shock and tragedy."

Word folk like Sokolowski can't pinpoint exactly why people look words up online, but they know it's not only to check spellings or definitions. Right after 9/11, words that included "rubble" and "triage" spiked, he says. A couple days after that, more political words took over in relation to the tragedy, including "jingoism" and "terrorism."

"But then we finally hit 'surreal,' so we had a concrete response, a political response and finally a philosophical response," Sokolowski says. "That's what connects all these tragic events."