noun
1A time machine.
‘The Proclaimers were once asked where they would most like a Tardis to drop them in history, and expressed a wish to be flies on the studio wall while Van Morrison and the Chieftains recorded their Irish Heartbeat album.’- ‘He said: "The Tardis can travel anywhere through space and time, so it could be going anywhere, including Swindon."’
- ‘Aunty screens the original series, when he introduced us to the joys of time travel in the Tardis.’
- ‘Propped up against one speaker, there's a postcard of the Tardis materialising in the middle of a stone circle.’
- ‘The experience of the bathrooms is like stepping into a time capsule, like a modern Tardis contrasting with the ‘olde-worldy’ charm of the rooms themselves.’
2A building or container that is larger inside than it appears to be from outside.
‘The mind is like a Tardis, far bigger on the inside that it appears on the outside.’- ‘Though the building looks very spacious from the outside, the staff have dubbed it the Tardis in reverse, as the interior is more compact than you would imagine.’
- ‘The experimental house has been compared to a Tardis.’
- ‘It's a bit of a Tardis - two townhouses knocked together, with a long gallery at the back where the garden used to be.’
- ‘Stretching away at the back of the house - like the rural equivalent of a Tardis - are 17 acres of land.’
Origin
The name (said to be an acronym of time and relative dimensions in space) of a time machine which had the exterior of a police telephone box in the British TV science fiction series Doctor Who, first broadcast in 1963.
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