Phrase guide
Definitions and examples are grouped by meaning. Pronunciation, history, word forms, translations, descendants, synonyms, antonyms, derived terms, and related words appear whenever the source provides them.
Sound
Each Play button uses your device's default local English voice, or a natural local fallback. The selected voice name appears after playback. This is synthesized speech, not a source recording.
No pronunciation record was provided for this word.
noun
A theoretical set of 10,000 people who learn something considered "common knowledge" for the first time.
Definition source: English Wiktionary via Wiktextract
Usage: plural, plural-only
Synonyms: none provided
Antonyms: none provided
History
Coined by American cartoonist, author and engineer Randall Munroe in 2012 in his webcomic xkcd, based on a calculation that given four million yearly births in the United States, about ten thousand people learn something that "everyone knows" every day.
