10 Things Everyone Always Gets Wrong About Doctor Who
9. All Gallifreyans Are Time Lords
The descriptors "Time Lord" and "Gallifreyan" are thrown around interchangeably by fans and non-fans alike. To be completely fair though, Doctor Who hasn't done the best job of making the differences between the two clear.
While all Time Lords are Gallifreyan, not all Gallifreyans are Time Lords. The Time Lords are a super-duper special group that wears funny hats and does all the talking - they're basically Gallifrey's government officials. According to the Tenth Doctor in The Sound of Drums, they're ordinary Gallifreyan children who were taken from their families at a young age, and entered into the Time Lord Academy. Here, they gazed into the Untempered Schism, which showed them the power of the Time Vortex.
According to the version of events depicted in The Timeless Children, Gallifrey's indigenous people are the Shobogans, a group of whom renamed themselves "Time Lords" after the Timeless Child's DNA granted them the ability to regenerate.
In a nutshell, people on Gallifrey aren't automatically Time Lords from birth. There are ordinary Gallifreyans in one camp, and those who go on to become Time Lords in another. We've even seen some of these ordinary Gallifreyans in the show, such as the young boy in Heaven Sent, or the Outsiders in The Invasion of Time.
Once again: all Time Lords are Gallifreyan... but not all Gallifreyans are Time Lords.