Doctor Who: 10 Huge Plot Holes The Writers Hoped We Forgot

5. Who Came Up With The Acronym, TARDIS?

TARDIS, or Time And Relative Dimension In Space, has entered the Oxford English Dictionary. Police boxes these days are often referred to as TARDISes, and the symbol of that blue box has become synonymous not just with Doctor Who but with science-fiction and British television in general. But who came up with the name? Any self-respecting Who fan will tell you it was Susan Foreman, the Doctor's granddaughter. So why exactly, in 'The Name Of The Doctor' was there a "TARDIS repair shop" if Susan was the one to name them? Why do all Time Lords and Gallifreyans within the show call it a TARDIS? It's something that the show's never felt the need to correct: unless one Gallifreyan girl renamed these things that had been around centuries before she was born though, it's simply not true. One possibility is that the translation circuit of the ship translates any word that the Time Lords have for the TARDIS; it would explain why the word translates to a useful acronym in our language, anyway.