10 Things Everyone Always Gets Wrong About Doctor Who

6. Time And Relative Dimensions In Space

Doctor Who TARDIS David Tennant
BBC Studios

There are several iconic pop-culture quotes that many people get wrong. Darth Vader actually says "No, I am your father", rather than the "Luke, I am your father", that most people incorrectly recall. And no, it isn't "Mirror, mirror, on the wall" - it's actually "Magic mirror on the wall". Rookie mistake!

Doctor Who also has one of these, and it involves the way that many fans wrongly remember the TARDIS' full name.

Towards the end of Doctor Who's very first episode, Susan Foreman - the Doctor's granddaughter - claims that she was the one who came up with the TARDIS acronym, by taking the initials from the phrase, "Time And Relative Dimension In Space".

Despite that singular "Dimension" being used not just by Susan, but by the Fifth Doctor in Frontios, the Eighth Doctor in the TV movie, and the Tenth Doctor in Smith and Jones - among many other examples - fans usually remember it as the plural "Dimensions" instead, probably because it rolls off the tongue a little bit easier.

To be fair, "Dimensions" has also been used in the show (Adric in Four to Doomsday, the Seventh Doctor in Delta and the Bannermen) but with the singular version of the word being not just the original, but the more prolific, it's "Time And Relative Dimension In Space" that's the correct version of the two.

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Danny has been with WhatCulture for almost nine years, and is currently Doctor Who Editor and WhoCulture Channel Manager, overseeing all of WhatCulture's Whoniverse coverage. He has been writing and video editing for 10+ years, and first got a taste for content creation after making his own Doctor Who trailers and uploading them to YouTube (they're admittedly a bit rusty by today's standards). If you need someone to recite every Doctor Who episode in order or to tell you about the making of 1988's Remembrance of the Daleks, Danny is the person to ask.