The most widely accepted account of the movement's naming concerns a meeting held in 1916 at Hugo Ball's Cabaret (Café) Voltaire in Zürich. 

A paper knife was inserted into a French-German dictionary and pointed to the word dada.

This word was seized upon by the group as appropriate for their anti-aesthetic creations and protest activities.

The bourgeois values were looked upon as the root of  much of the world's problems and a chief cause of World War I. 

After 1922, however, Dada faded and many Dadaists grew interested in surrealism.