10 Things Everyone Always Gets Wrong About Doctor Who

6. Time And Relative Dimensions In Space

TARDIS Doctor Who
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 over ten years, and is currently Doctor Who Editor and WhoCulture Channel Manager, overseeing all of WhatCulture's Whoniverse coverage. In 2022, he took charge of WhoCulture and has grown it into the biggest Doctor Who channel on YouTube, and one of the biggest Doctor Who communities on the web full-stop. He has been writing and video editing since his early teens, and first got a taste for content creation after making his own Doctor Who trailers, off the back of a burning obsession with the Matt Smith era of the show. Like many his age, he first got into Doctor Who with the 2005 revival, but has since gone back and fallen in love with the classic years too. If you need someone to recite every Doctor Who episode in order, or to give you a random factoid about the making of Gridlock, Danny is the person to ask!