xkcd.WTF!?

Explanation ➲

This comic purports to finally answer the question, "What does xkcd mean?" However, instead of giving an answer as to what the letters actually mean (see below), he offers five quirky behaviors that he says represent the meaning of the word. This is reminiscent of TV commercials that ask, "What does [brand name] mean? It means [happy activity]!".

• The first panel shows a driver, marked by a red line, making a right turn at a red light, a U-turn on the connecting road, and then another right turn, returning them to their original direction presumably faster than waiting for the light. Right turns at red lights and U-turns are legal in all 50 states, but some intersections do not allow them (and turning at a red light is illegal everywhere in Europe, except for if the traffic lights have been fitted with an auxilliary green arrow which indicates such an allowance during a road junction's sequence). Hence, this complicated maneuver is "questionably legal". However, under certain circumstances in the US state of Oregon, it appears that this is actually legal.

• The second panel shows Cueball searching for his mobile phone by having his friend call it to locate the ringtone, only to hear a ring from inside of his dog's stomach, possibly a reference to Jurassic Park III.^{[citation needed]} This, by the way, is a weird depiction. Usually this is done by someone with or close to you. Because if Cueball didn't have his phone, then how could he get someone outside the house to call it? Having someone you meet call your phone, presumably to find it, is used in 2900: Call My Cell, although it turned out it was not really about finding the phone, rather, Black Hat showing his inner classhole.

• The third panel discusses calling an Ackermann function using Graham's number as input arguments to horrify mathematicians, where Graham's number is a (very) large number (once celebrated as the largest number ever used in a proof, although it is no longer the record holder), and the Ackermann function is a (very) fast-growing function, thus the function's output must be insanely large. (In fact, A(g₆₄, g₆₄) is actually smaller than g₆₅.)

• The fourth panel describes how walking in a specific pattern on a tile floor based on arbitrary rules related to the position of the black and white tiles will cause someone to be unable to walk normally on a tile floor ever again. This is further referenced in 245: Floor Tiles.

• The title text refers to stigmata, marks corresponding to Jesus' crucifixion wounds. They are also sometimes reported to bleed periodically. Using ketchup to fake stigmata would be a good idea, as from afar people would think that you actually are bleeding from your (supposed) stigmata. Devout Catholics have claimed to have spontaneously developed stigmata.

Meaning of xkcd

It's not actually an acronym. It's just a word with no phonetic pronunciation — a treasured and carefully-guarded point in the space of four-character strings.

—Randall Munroe, About xkcd

Actually, I've been using [xkcd] as just a unique point in the space of four-character strings to point to me. I've been using it as my name on every service box since at least the nineties, because I got tired of changing my name every time my interest changed. I started out when I was 10 years old when AOL first popped up and I was on there as, I think I had, first, "Skywalker4", then "Animorph7", and then [...] other names [...] like "Redtailedhawk6" or something. Eventually, I was like, I'm tired of names that point to other things, that identify me with those things. I want to get a string that will just point uniquely to me that's not my name, because that's kind of boring. And so, I [decided] to generate random strings and find one that had a certain set of qualities, which included:

• none of the letters could be mistaken for other letters [or] numbers, so no "L", because "L", lower-cased, can look like "i" or "1";
• it couldn't have any obvious acronym decoding [...] or be an existing acronym;
• it couldn't be pronounceable because then it would sound like [...] a word, and people would think of other words like it.

So, I searched though a bunch of names that weren't taken, until I found one that wasn't taken on all the services I wanted.

—Randall Munroe, in a speech for Google

According to the xkcd FAQ and Randall Munroe himself, the name xkcd doesn't stand for anything. He says it originated as a previously unused random four-letter string which he used as his username on various internet services. There are other theories about what xkcd might stand for (not verified and probably not true):

• If each letter of the alphabet is mapped to 1 through 26, the sum of the values for "x", "k", "c", and "d" is equal to 42, which is the answer given to the Ultimate Question of Life, The Universe, and Everything by the supercomputer in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. However, according to Randall himself, this is a coincidence.^{[actual citation needed]}
• A now-deleted Reddit account noted that typing "xkcd" on a Persian QWERTY keyboard returns "طنزی", which means satirical, sarcastic, and comic.
• "x", "k", "c", and "d" are consecutive letters when typed on a left-handed Dvorak keyboard.