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...iller-xkcd-every-majors-terrible/ Xkcd's 'Every Major's Terrible' Is Now A Real Song]. :''Unbearable'' and ''terrible'' rhyme for people who have the {{w|English-language vowel changes before historic /r/#Mary–marry–merry merger|Mary

...by {{w|Edgar Allan Poe}}, one of the most popular pieces of poetry in the English language. The comic quotes the first four lines of the work, in which the { This unexpected turn reflects the ambiguity of the verb "to rap" in English. According to the [http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/rap Merriam-We

...pparently basing this desire on the fact that Irons, a classically trained English actor, portrayed Scar, the main antagonist in the 1994 Disney animated feat [[Category:Comics featuring real people]]

...ction. The fictional person believes a circular map is more fitting to the real Earth's three-dimensional spherical nature because both are round. This bel ...nnot be offended by being referred to by the wrong pronouns. In {{w|Middle English}} 'they' and 'their' were {{w|Singular they|accepted genderless pronouns th

...the NHC has named the hurricanes using random words out of the {{w|Oxford English Dictionary}} (OED). The humor here is intrinsic: "Hurricane Eggbeater" is a ...all points on a surface is an {{w|uncountable set}} (as is the set of all real numbers). {{w|Cantor diagonalization}} is a famous proof that it is impo

...ony of finding the incorrect explanation (the analogy) interesting and the real explanation (the mathematics) boring.

...{{w|superscript}}.<font color="#36b"><ref>Aha! I fooled you and this is a real ref tag! However, there are no references.</ref>^[3][4]</font> Wh ...Latin words. -Ax is also, specifically, the root of the -acious ending in English, as in "audacious" or (appropriately) [http://www.merriam-webster.com/dicti

...ternet and for this work, he was awarded the 2002 IEEE Internet Award. His real name is Stephen D. Crocker. *Dr. {{w|Stephen Wolff}}, spelled differently than Steve, but the same as the real name of Steve Crocker. He is one of the many fathers of the Internet, mainl

...he latter, contains identical characters in the 2nd and 4th positions. (In English translations of the text, this is the part rendered as "LORD" in capitals.) [[Category:Comics featuring real people]]

...quent ads are those that mention "Play free games!". While these sites are real, they tend to be collections of Flash-based games taken from other sites fr ...|| The shoot-'em-up game "Zero Wing" on SEGA's Genesis console features an English translation so terrible it has long been a source of memetic humor. The lin

...he Chinese game Happy Farm was more popular at the time. This strikes many English-speaking xkcd readers as odd, because Farmville is much more famous, leadin ...w|Facebook}}''' is a social networking site that allows people to meet old real−life friends and make new friends that share similar interests. One of it

...tch</code>, and <code>Throwable</code>. These can refer to actions in the real-life game, but are also keywords in the Java language that are used for {{w ...throwing and catching the <code>Ball</code> object. Note that unlike the real game, this program actually has the same person both throwing and catch the

...the pressure at the {{w|Inner_core|Earth's core}} and the width of the {{w|English Channel}}. ...s \frac{\text{Prius combined EPA gas mileage}}{\text{Minimum width of the English Channel}} = \pi</math>

...o decode the book. A cut out from the book is depicted in the first frame (real or similar). ...d Dragons. They speak in a somewhat outdated English. The reference to the real plant {{w|Aconitum|Wolfsbane}} could also be a reference to another invente

...ical to intellectual, and east-west corresponds to one from web-focused to real-life-focused. The map also bears a slight resemblance to {{w|South East Asi ...map. Left is "Focus on Real Life," labelled "IRL," an abbreviation for "In Real Life." Right is "Focus on Web," labelled ".com." Up is "Practicals," labell

...do Americans hate soccer? || Soccer, or (association) football in British English, is rather unpopular in the USA compared to most other regions of the world |Why aren't Pokémon real?||Pokémon are fantasized creatures that were designed to produce an intere

...the Exhibitionist, all of which have negative connotations in contemporary English. That the viewer is encouraged to identify negatively with these four posit ...that he is usually the Philosopher. Also, “Philosopher” in vernacular English is neutrally valenced, potentially having the ability to expound either wis

It appeared that Randall created new panels in near real time, as user suggestions to dialog were submitted around the release of th ...clusive. Some of the options that were there very early were in quite poor English. Later, the same idea was still there, but in a more refined sentence. Howe

:::Real value $27,370 ::$1,000/yr for 30 years (inflation-adjusted) at a 4% real return (long-term stock + dividend average) $56,080

|"Real age/name unknown":<p>Cooper's real name remains unknown. While he was estimated to be in his mid-40s, his prec ...otiable American currency," it is phrased in a way not typical of American English.</p><p>The phrase "You're tearing me apart!" originally appeared in ''{{w|R

...tion from the database. In the library example, one might select (in plain English) all books written by a certain author or published after a certain date, e The percentage of people lit appears to approximately correspond to real demographic data: note, 5 of the 10 characters are female; the median world

[[:File:pixels-time-turner.png|This panel]] jokes that if the real life JK Rowling had a fictional time-turner which worked, she would have go ...aning of the word "hydrant", a pipe which supplies water (derived from the English root ''hydro-'' meaning ''relating to water'', which is in turn from the Gr

...ken the underlying equivalence relation to heart, and (over)applying it to real life, genuinely judging sets to be identical if they all contain N objects. ...or example, has both sinij and goluboj to describe different blues that in English are both blue. Japanese, as another example, has blue and green together (k

...comic books and other fiction (though unfortunately, this does not work in real life{{Citation needed}}). It's possible the plutonium is even in her womb, The English physicist {{w|Henry Moseley}} discovered the law relating the {{w|atomic nu

...in a south-top map. Such a map is, of course, almost completely useless in real life, because it completely distorts the relative positioning of the landma ...n this world map, a channel now exists between the UK and North Korea (the real world's South Korea) there could obviously have been many wars for the domi

|The {{w|Roanoke Colony}} was the first English attempt to establish a permanent settlement in the New World. The colony of ...f the creature in the film - but contains so many features not seen on any real ape (for instance, dark palms and hairy breasts) that few scientists take i

|Old-English style message for "buffer overrun" instead of more modern language. There w |virtual memory got too real

| 30 years ($1,000/yr at a 4% real return (long-term stock + dividend average) ! rowspan="4"|Real estate

...nd a vocabulary of the 1,000 (or ''ten hundred'') most common words in the English language. Randall found his own method to determine which words would go on ...mic). But it was far from being a small or normal comic! It was the first "real" game comic released on xkcd (albeit not the first [[:Category:Interactive

...a star in the constellation Orion. It is commonly (at least by speakers of English) pronounced as "beetlejuice". {{w|Beetlejuice}}, however is a film directed ...ng the same as how the {{w|Uranus (mythology)|Greek god}} is pronounced in English) is preferred by astronomers, but both are commonly heard. Similarly to Dun

The '''{{w}}''' are an English {{w|girl group}} formed in 1994, consisting of "Scary Spice", "Sporty Spice [[Category:Real people]]

...d phrases are replaced with synonyms which are chosen from the most common English words. This renders ordinary words like "rocket" into "flying space car", o ! Real Title

...sual data set for people to play with. This is obviously not going to be a real random sample of people, but in the interest of getting cooler data, if you ...hese words don’t appear in any of the following dictionaries: the Oxford English Dictionary, the New Oxford American Dictionary, Wiktionary, or Dictionary.c

...ssible to mistake the two words when spoken in the majority of dialects of English. ...the two main pieces of the ''Titanic'' wreck, which, as it likely would in real life, garners media coverage as a 'historic salvage'. The salvage seems to

...acquired or built a new high powered {{w|flashlight}} ("torch" in British English), which he wants to demonstrate to [[Megan]]. When Cueball refers to older :Cueball: Real bright, though.

**There is both a giant octopus' arm (marked as ''not real'') and a very large octopus under the ship. The shape of the octopus is the ...ide]] - a direct hoverboard reference, and complaint that they are not yet real (only [http://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/images/0/01/1608_1048x1095y_Two_hove

...tletext = SOUND DOGS MAKE: [BARKING] [HISSING] [LIGHTSABER NOISES] [FLUENT ENGLISH] [SWEARING] The comic might also be a joke on real-life controls, physical or virtual, often having no clear "default" value.

...to the {{w|imperial system}} as previously used in most of the rest of the English speaking world. They have many commonalites, and both systems have temperat ...ind most convenient? This is probably the reason he ends up not giving any real answer, as giving the answer in Celsius would make him a bad friend. Panick

...e as the host mentions that people keep asking her whether or not she is a real astronomer. ...th how to zero in on a word and its definition. For a typical and expected English dictionary (unless she made further errors) the word "Astronomer" is actual

...hat are created with the pairs. See the whole [[#List of real duos|list of real duos]] as well as the [[#List of alternative duos|list of alternative duos] ...though this exact combo would not be possible in the xkcd version, as the "real universe" combo takes the second names from two duos rather than the first

...h/podium podium] and [http://www.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com/definition/english/lectern lectern] in Oxford Learners Dictionaries. In medieval universities, The comic is playing on a stereotypical politician, without any real beliefs, here represented by Cueball, but they want to appear to stand for

...sense, as Markov processes are probabalistic and have no knowledge of how English semantics work.

...tes nor Canada existed yet).{{citation needed}} Also, glaciers don't speak English, or any language for that matter.{{Citation needed}} ...rica (although Megan, immediately underneath, does note that this is not a real fact). As the writing stated that ''Pokemon go extinct'' this can also be s

...ws the first part of a dictionary entry on the word ''Reductionism''. In a real dictionary like [http://www.dictionary.com/ Dictionary.com] an [http://www. ...ery letter of the {{w|Latin alphabet}} (the writing system used by the {{w|English language}} and many other languages) is ultimately derived from {{w|Egyptia

...ee the explanation of the next comic about the strange fact that it speaks English). Megan points it towards a spider sitting in its web; the Sphere is awestr ...avel, and they decided to use time travel the first time to go back to see real spiders on Earth. This also tells us that they are from so far into the fut

...found in their entirety). And they do not know whether they even represent real events or myths. One of the two is indeed a myth, as it is about a man buil ...ve come from Earth (maybe travelled away), they may just have retained the English language. But given the fact that young people today probably would not und

All of these words can be looked up in the English version of Wikipedia, but only a few are {{w|common noun}}s, three of them **Enough tiles (...): Are there enough tiles in the standards English version of Scrabble to write the word?

...ome of these, as well as including many silly names that simply sound like real British towns to an American ear. A protractor is shown off the coast of th Note that in British English, the correct spelling of “labeled” is ‘labelled’.

...s are. The "two thumbs" is a reference to a well known type of jokes among English speakers. One of the most frequent forms is one person interrupting another ...unter and become mired in quicksand than for a real individual to do so as real quicksand is a rare occurrence in most climates on Earth.

|colspan=4| {{w|David Attenborough}} is an English broadcaster and naturalist, who produced a documentary series ''{{w|The Lif [[Category:Comics featuring real people]]

...the screen below the glass. A typical feature noticed about the glass for real phones would be its strength, as in work phones for construction workers. : A similar real advertisement regarding the chassis would be that it was {{w|waterproof}} d

.... the {{w|Devonian}} is named after the {{w|ceremonial counties of England|English ceremonial county}} of {{w|Devon}} (aka Devonshire), while the {{w|Permian} ...not educated in the science) by just inserting dog breeds names instead of real names as no one remembers the names of all the microplates. An actual geolo

...hat Black Hat is making up nicknames. Many of his suggestions are puns for real nicknames of other places. ...ndroupolis}}; {{w|Metropolis}} can either be a type of city, or one of the real or fictional cities bearing the name. Possibly a reference to The Phantom T

...of the celestial objects are that similar as shown nor the orbits are. The real scales are shown in this table: ! real (in km)

...rmal features of modern smartphones. "3-G acceleration", however, is not a real term, and doesn't describe any meaningful feature of a phone. It appears to *The number 26 refers to the number of letters in the English alphabet

...ng the user. For this reason, Twitter has removed verified checkmarks from real accounts of celebrities because of political controversies in the past. Exa The last line of dialogue is a typical English sentence and has nothing to do with the Twitter Moments feature, which can

...in Portuguese the proper plural would be "santos"). Under the most common English approach for making a plural noun, Santa would have a plural of "Santas". T ...succession from [[2003: Presidential Succession]] is used in place of the real one, Santa's place in the line would correspond to either a person who does

...a [https://techcrunch.com/2018/02/15/iphone-text-bomb-ios-mac-crash-apple/ real vulnerability] in iOS and MacOS publicized a few days before the comic was ...nce "{{w|SQL}}" like "sequel", after SQL's predecessor "SEQUEL (Structured English Query Language)". The standard for SQL suggests that it should be pronounce

...cter is commonly transcribed differently into British English and American English as ae and e respectively making a difference in spelling in words such as e ...ook of the same name}}, this is the first generation on the list to have a real, commonly accepted name, and was named as such due to being the generation

..."Frank ... Johnson. That sounds like a real person! Let me just Google him real quick." ...hion designers ({{w|Oscar de la Renta}}), and so on. Most of the names are real people but a few are fictional characters, including some non-human charact

Spell check> English (links to [[1069: Alphabet]]) and Colors (links to [https://blog.xkcd.com/2 ...s first April Fools' comic [[404: Not Found]], which cannot be found, as a real comic by linking to it. Bookmarks/> Secret> Enable Dark Web adds the 'Dark

...o more than say hiring a bricklayer as a doctor would actually make them a real doctor. ...human speech is broken into subject, object, and verb; for some reason in English we are capable of producing and comprehending speech without objects or ver

Most English {{w|English compound|compound nouns}} can be constructed recursively. In many cases the ! Real term

...aid conception's misalignment with reality. Though some trends reflect the real value of the numbers on the graph, i.e. 100 million larger than 10 million ...blem surrounding the intuitive grasping of large numbers: the flaws in the English words used for them. For instance, nothing about the word "million" suggest

...graduates are entitled to delete one word of their choice from the Oxford English Dictionary. ...ps the intention is that such "deleted" words are in fact removed from the English language itself. For example, {{w|Lake Superior State University}} has an

*The length of a light nanoseconds has been set to a 10th of its real value of about a foot. Thus is will not normally be used for any of the sta ***If another editor gets the message in English, please change this to the english version (may be the same though) and delete delete the google translate lin

...they can process ({{w|Rollover (key)|rollover}}). Computer keyboards for English may be limited to as few as 3 simultaneous keys, whereas other languages or ...e typing instructor for the ''Mavis Beacon'' game, and is fictional, not a real person. Additionally, as a typing instructor, this person (even if she actu

...hrases; however, some of these are rare or foreign enough that speakers of English don't always identify them correctly and pluralize the last word instead, e ...t ends the game is activated. Such a move can of course not be a part of a real basketball game, and more of a nod to the Golden State Warriors' reputation

...ardrobe}}'', Narnia is accessible through a wardrobe in a residence in the English countryside. {{w|Mr. Tumnus}} is a {{w|faun}} in Narnia and the first chara ...text, where the slower passing of time was used to take on time-intensive real world problems, was also used for one of the comics in [[821: Five-Minute C

...in a population. But a fringe theory holds that such memories are actually real, in some way related to either reality warping or alternate universes, leav ...el_sprouts_right/ there is an S] at the end of {{w|Brussels}} (at least in English, but not in Dutch, which is one of the official languages of Brussels/Belgi

...OK|Many etymologies}} have been proposed to explain its origin. The Oxford English Dictionary and most other modern dictionaries say that it began in 1839 as ...McCulloch]], a Canadian Internet linguist. She focuses on trends in use of English words in online communications. Randall claims that he consulted with her o

...[https://i.pinimg.com/236x/cb/a3/78/cba3788d5839c6f6dc24fcb488a2d4e8.jpg A real Lorem Ipsum tattoo found on the web] may just be a photoshop made by a tatt ...a reference to [[286]]. "{{w|All Your Base Are Belong to Us}}" is a broken English phrase found in the opening cutscene of the 1992 Mega Drive/Genesis port of

{{w|John Horton Conway|John Conway}}, an English mathematician, passed away of [[:Category:COVID-19|COVID-19]] on April 11, [[Category:Comics featuring real people]]

...pics in physics that are related to motion and forces and used in ordinary English to refer to things that exert power, force, growth, and change (dynamo, dyn ...ne case because it has only positive and no negative connotations in plain English. In the other case because there is much confusion over the meaning of the

...simply due to the placement of the particles in the table: In the American English vernacular, the phrase "left and right" is more common than "right and left [[Category:Comics featuring real people]]

...between different regions of the US. There are also quizzes about broader English dialects, but this comic focuses on commonly cited differences between Amer

| This appears to be an error. Under standard English {{w|Scrabble letter distribution}} there are 100 tiles of which 2 are M. Th [[Category:Comics featuring real people]]

...d change|sound shifting}} laws to it to guess how it would have evolved in English had it not been superseded, but saying it seems to actually summon a bear. :Ponytail: Gretchen, is this for real?

...een nouns and verbs by spelling, only grammatical usage, and many words in English are both nouns and verbs, depending on context and placement. ...ts. If you can find all of the pairs then they would be able to guess your real number and thus this would be a weird kind of phishing attempt. If the grid

"Out of the blue" is an English expression meaning "to appear in a sudden and unexpected fashion". It's a s [[Category:Comics featuring real people]]

[[File:CDC_COVID-19_Vaccination_Record_Card.jpg|thumb|300px|A real and appropriately censored CDC vaccination record.]] The sentence at the top of the card, which appears once in English and once in Spanish, has equivalent portions redacted in both languages:

..., for various reasons, one being that Wilson was the first translator into English who used words that showed the original connotations better(such as 'hounde [[Category: Comics featuring real people]]

Some features of the real world disappear, such as the English Channel, the North American Great Lakes, and the Strait of Gibraltar. The A

This comic is Randall's "design notes" for the {{w|English alphabet}}. The comic lists the A-to-Z alphabet, in black block letters, fr | rowspan="6" |"Decent consonants but no real heavy hitters here in the first third ("D" is solid, at least)"

|Europa, one of Jupiter's many moons (in real life). A broken, icy crust has a single path into its core. "English adjective order means that you're "Clifford the Big Red Dog" but not "Cliff

...n'' (i.e. what the name and look represent, what they refer to both in the real and fictional worlds and what xkcd comics may have been a source or an insp :'''Cueball''': I can't believe the Air and Space Museum's new exhibit has a real black hole!

...s instead of just dozens or hundreds, their result would be apocalyptic. A real-life example was [https://www.wired.co.uk/article/nhs-email-reply-all-down ...be included - "loop in" is common business jargon for {{wiktionary|loop_in#English|meaning "include in communication about something"}}, related to "being in

The word "''{{wiktionary|definitely}}''" is {{w|Commonly misspelled English words#C–D|known to be}} commonly {{wiktionary|misspelt}}, perhaps because The comic gives twelve 'words' that the subtitle claims are all real, and gives their definitions, whereas in reality only the first (the defini

...k waiting for patients to arrive. The phrase "the doctor" is often used in English as {{w|synecdoche}} for a doctor's office, commonly in the expression "to g | "We're like librarians, but for your bones and blood." || A real doctor wouldn't proactively define their profession to a new patient. If th

...-dimensional with the "''b''i" component {{w|orthogonal}} to the original "real" number line. Linguists never use the {{w|complex plane}} to represent vowe ...l position, and is often entirely optional in many if not most dialects of English. The pronunciation of "[ṡṡċċḣḣẇẇȧȧ]" in the title text is s

...citation needed}}<!-- The link [https://linguapress.com/grammar/article-in-english.htm] does *not* suggest that "a" is optional, only "the", and then only for [[Category:Comics featuring real people]]

...uld like to use would result in awkward sequences of letters which are not English words or familiar names, such as "aete", "eni", etc. However, they have an ...notable for their exclusive usage of the {{w|Letter frequency|most common English letters}}. Most of them also begin and end with a vowel. These are two feat

...sh author George Eliot, based around the eponymous (but fictional) central English town. The name was a rather tongue-in-cheek constructed British placename, .... Originally produced in French and available in several translations, the English version has narration by actor {{w|Morgan Freeman}}. It is also mentioned i

...11, 2012 || 1.0 || How many model rocket engines would it take to launch a real rocket into space? || About 65,000, give or take a few. || [[File:Model Roc | 34 || {{what if|34|Twitter}} || February 26, 2013 || 1.0 || How many unique English tweets are possible? How long would it take for the population of the world