Webcomic / xkcd

'Are you stealing those LCDs?' 'Yeah, but I'm doing it while my code compiles.'

"Warning: this comic occasionally contains strong language (which may be unsuitable for children), unusual humor (which may be unsuitable for adults), and advanced mathematics (which may be unsuitable for liberal-arts majors)."

— Former Content Warnings on xkcd comic pages

troper@tvtropes:/$ describe xkcd here

What? No, we're not doing another Describe Topic Here joke.

troper@tvtropes:/$ su

root@tvtropes:/# describe xkcd here^note sudo

Okay.

xkcd is a Stick-Figure Comic by Randall Munroe. It is a gag-a-day comic and generally does not have a continuing plot line or continuity (though there are occasional short story arcs). Many of the jokes are based on math, physics, science, UNIX or Internet memes, as well as romance and sex. It utilizes Alt Text for each and every comic, which contains additional jokes and context.

Originally a relatively unknown set of personal sketches and doodles, it grew in popularity in 2006 when other webcomics (such as Dinosaur Comics) began linking to it. However, it was when Randall posted "Map of the Internet" and said map was subsequently featured on Slashdot that xkcd's popularity truly erupted. Since then, it has been among the most well-known of webcomics.

Of course, you wouldn't know that just by looking at the comic. The characters are still drawn as very basic stick figures, with no facial features other than hairstyle (which is often used to distinguish males and females). However, there are three recurring characters who can be recognized by their respective headgear:

• "Black Hat Guy": a Jerkass badass character with a black pork-pie hat, who in one storyline encountered a woman who out-Jerkassed him and has now become his romantic interest.
• A beret-clad Cloudcuckoolander and Anti-Nihilist, generally thought of as an Existentialist, albeit one with strange powers and a thing for pastries.
• A dark-haired woman, referred to in several comics as "Megan"; she shares many of the same interests with the nondescript Author Avatar and is commonly shown to be in a relationship with him. Was the main character of the "Choices" Series.
• There also seems to be a recurring main character with a distinct personality (most likely the author's own), but since he looks exactly the same as all the other stick figures without hair or hats, it could be argued that he's just a stock character. He has picked up the nicknameinvoked Cueball.

There are other recurring characters in the same social circle—e.g. the dark-haired existential nihilist—but most of them are less distinctive.

Has mentioned this very wiki. The wiki has returned the favor, taking many xkcd comics for page images (see ImageSource.xkcd for the list), as well as (formerly; may he be mourned) making the image for all pages under the category "Webcomic" a little picture of Black Hat Guy.

xkcd is part of the documentation for goto on the PHP website and was mentioned as a ticket in a changelog.◊^note For those curious, here's #619.

Two big occurrences for the comic happened in 2012. The webcomic reached one thousand comics in January; as the above-mentioned main character says, "Wow—just 24 to go until a big round-number milestone!" Later in June, xkcd added a section called What If? to its website, where Randall tackles hypothetical questions with physics and silly drawings. Has a lot of snark.

Numerologists take note: adding up the numerical values of the title's letters yields a sum of 42. Coincidence?...Yes.

Completely unrelated, but some fans had the bright idea to create graphs in xkcd style.

Two entries, the subcomic Time and the "small game" Hoverboard, are so big that they have their own pages.

The comic also has a wiki of sorts of its own; Explain XKCD, a resource for understanding the jokes that may fly over the reader's head.

---

xkcd provides examples of:

#-E

• 20% More Awesome: Used repeatedly, including this particularly meta example involving a graph about a decline in a relationship that might be caused by graphing things.
• Absence Makes the Heart Go Yonder: Exaggerated in 57: Wait For Me, where in the 90 seconds Megan was gone, Cueball had a baby with another woman, and the baby grew to about Megan's age.
• Achievements in Ignorance: Beret Guy does this a lot. Examples include Vacuum, where he uses a vacuum cleaner to "unlock the tremendous energy of the vacuum [as in "vacuum energy" in quantum mechanics]"; and Interferometry, where he uses the principles of interferometry to ride two small dogs as if they were one giant dog.
• Affectionate Parody: 141: Parody Week, whose strips don't really make fun of anything and, in some cases, could actually have been used by the regular cartoonist except for the artwork. It turns into a deconstruction of parody with the author halting his MegaTokyo parody because he feels sorry for the writer. The author also stops a later Penny Arcade parody because he respects the writers too much (with the respect transitioning to Ho Yay and then Slash Fic before he finishes.)
• Age-Gap Algebra: Dating Pools focuses on the "half your age plus seven" rule, which says that it is creepy to date anyone who is half your age plus 7 years.
• Aggressive Categorism: How It Works: When a guy sucks at math, it's the guy's problem; when a girl sucks at math, the problem lies with all girls.
  Guy to Guy: Wow, you suck at math.
  Guy to Girl: Wow, girls suck at math.
• A.I. Is a Crapshoot:
  • Zealous Autoconfig shows Cueball trying to connect to a Wi-Fi network of someone's access points. The "zealous autoconfig" program in his computer begins a dictionary attack, attempts to find a WEP vulnerability, connects to Cueball's Bluetooth to locate the children of the owner of the access point, and kidnaps the children to start a negotiation with their parents.
  • Genetic Algorithms provides one solution to prevent this from happening: setting the cost of the algorithm from becoming Skynet to a very high amount.
  • Subverted in Skynet, where Skynet "becomes too self-aware" and stops its plan of killing all humans.
• All Just a Dream: In Tech Support, Cueball is given the chance to ask a tech-savvy person for help if he speaks a secret word on the phone, which could help him on tech support. It is revealed, however, to be a dream.
• All Love Is Unrequited: In Creepy, Cueball and Megan are sitting on chairs. Megan secretly wants Cueball to notice her, but the reason why he is ignoring her is because he thought he would get regarded as creepy if he did try to talk to her.
• Alt Text: Every single comic has a second punchline if you hover your mouse over the comic for a few seconds. This is probably one of the most well-known examples of such, in fact (even providing the trope page's image).
• Alternative Calendar:
  • In Daylight Calendar, a new calendar system is implemented in which a "day" is counted as 12 hours of daylight, however long that may be, in order to provide extra time on deadlines. During November, the sun may rise and set as many as three times a "day".
  • Consensus Time has a different alternate handling of a "day": people click a button when they feel like it's 9 AM, and then the clocks adjust themselves based on the median of their choices.
• Ambiguous Syntax:
  • Hyphen plays on the suffix "-ass" as an intensifier and the prefix "ass-" as a modifier.
  • Jacket plays on "fucking" being both an intensifier and the present participle of "fuck".
  • Laser Scope plays on "miss" meaning 'aiming for a target and not hitting it', and 'sadness at not seeing them': "Miss your loved ones? You don't have to. RJX-21 laser scope". Alt Text: I wish I'd missed you then so I wouldn't be missing you now"
• Anachronism Stew: Discussed in Period Speech, where all the words and phrases in the character's dialogue are from different periods. The point is that a few hundred years from now, all the English from historical and modern times would be lumped together into "old-timey language" and thus be interchangable.
• Analogy Backfire: In SkiFree, the monster in the eponymous game (which runs faster than the player) is likened by Megan to the inevitability of death. What she didn't know is that pressing the "F" key could make the player go faster than the monster.
• Ancient Astronauts: Parodied in "Alien Visitors", which plays with the usual trope by having the aliens who would teach humanity to build stone monuments arrive thousands of years too late. "Alien Visitors 2" continues the story of the previous strip by having the aliens recommend technologies that humans have learned to be dangerous, such as a hydrogen blimp and lead gasoline, or inefficient, such as biplanes and Juicero.
• Angrish: Parental Trolling has a father conditioning his daughter's speech centers to shut down when she's upset. Hilarity Ensues.
• Animal Athlete Loophole:
  • There's no rule saying a meerkat can't play rugby!
  • Nor anything in any Terms of Service saying that dogs can't play baseball in the server room. (the Alt Text)
  • You have to be careful when invoking this excuse, since there's also no rule against the other team killing and eating the animal. ^note Well, technically there actually is a rule that covers it, but taking the intentional foul is probably worth getting the animal off the field. Not to mention the free meat.
  • Sweet 16 plays it straight, exaggerates it, inverts it and parodies it. It shows a final-16 bracket for a basketball tournament, and the teams on the upper left corner are a school team with a dog, a school whose team is entirely dogs, a dog team with one human, and a dog team with one cat.
• Anti-Advice: According to New Products, products that are criticized by techies achieve great success, and those that are hyped eventually flop.
• Anything but That!: Many of the strips revolve around Randall's fear of velociraptors. Search History, for example, shows Randall's search history consisting of information about velociraptors and ways to survive their attacks.
• Appeal to Familial Wisdom: In "Flies", a character falls back on this only to discover their mother's Proverbial Wisdom was far from infallible.
• Appeal to Worse Problems: Demonstrated in herBigger Probleme, as an excuse for not helping to fix <problem>. Naturally, when called on it, they don't want to help with <bigger problem> either.

• April Fools' Day: xkcd has an April Fools related comic or event almost every year.
  • 2008 sees the infamous #404 "strip"; xkcd famously skipped #404 and went from #403 to #405, and thus attempting to look up a #404 XKCD comic yields a standard Page Not Found error, although this is treated as if it was its own strip.
  • For 2010, they changed the layout so that you navigate through the comics with a text interface. If you typed in 'cat' with no arguments, you'd get a line of text that reads "You're a kitty!" There were a lot of Easter Eggs hidden in there. 'make me a sandwich'/'sudo make me a sandwich', emacs, MUD Shout-Out jokes (type "look", or "go south"), the Konami Code... the list goes on.
  • For 2011, all of XKCD's comics are in 3D. This is also still findable. Doubles as a Hypocritical Humor given the actual strip posted on the same day.
  • 2012's "Umwelt" which becomes completely different comics on different web browsers or operating systems (with at least four different variations in Google Chrome, Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox, and Opera), and sometimes even changes due to your physical location on Earth. One appeared only to people who signed up to see Randall's talk at CNU.
  • 2013's "Externalities" is bundled with a competition for university students to break a Skein hash, and also an appeal to donate to the Wikimedia foundation. The comic's panels constantly changes as students attempt to break the hash and donate to Wikimedia, among other things. Unfortunately, the comic seems to have broke as of 2019, showing only a blank page when viewed.
  • 2014's "Lorenz" is an interactive short choose-your-own-adventure comic. At one point, readers were even able to suggest their own lines for the story. The title was in honor of Edward Norton Lorenz, the mathematician who founded the modern chaos theory.
  • 2015's "XKCloud" is another interactive comic, where the character in the comic admits to have lost all their data thanks to a flimsy cloud setup and asks readers to help them combine which images go to which pictures and vice versa. Readers were even able to submit their own drawings or text.
  • 2016's "Garden" is a gardening simulator game. You start off with a light, and if you wait for long enough, plants will grow. You can add more lights or even change the lights' colors and an assortment of other things besides plants will pop out of the ground.
  • 2018's "Right Click" encourages readers to right click on the comic to save the full image. However, right clicking on the image would give an utterly nonsensical right click prompt, full of secrets, jokes, games, endless nesting, and references to past XKCD comics.^note The full image can actually be saved, it just takes a ton of digging.
  • 2019's "Emojidome" pits hundreds of emojis against each other by viewer voting. In the end, the two winners are the Milky Way emoji (🌌) at #1 and the Hedgehog emoji (🦔) at #2, which were featured in the final comic image.
  • 2020's "Collector's Edition" sends readers on a scavenger hunt for items scattered through other XKCD comic pages, and encourages them to bring them over back to the "Collector's Edition" page and put them there to showcase them.
  • 2021's "Checkbox" shows only a single checkbox, which clears itself when checked. An unmute button is also provided. Readers can input messages on the checkbox in Morse code, by timing the presses on the checkbox. In return, should the unmute button is clicked beforehand, the checkbox will reply back to them, also in Morse code. This is the first of the only two XKCD comics with audio, which is followed by...
  • 2022's "Instructions", which isn't really a comic so much as it is a 9-hour long audio file. The audio is a mix of random facts about turtles and a detailed series of coding instructions for the programming language LOGO. When executed, the program will draw the actual comic◊.
• Arson, Murder, and Jaywalking:
  • "There's no porn set atop storm chasing vans. No homoerotic spelling bees. No women playing electric guitar in the shower". The last one actually worked, so it probably was not so bad.
  • The future predictions for 2100 end with: "Rainforests mostly gone due to climate shifts", "All coral reefs gone" and "Gillette introduces 14 bladed razor".
  • The Alt Text for 1036 reads: "I plugged in this lamp and my dog went rigid, spoke a sentence of perfect Akkadian, and then was hurled sideways through the picture window. Even worse, it's one of those lamps where the switch is on the cord."
  • Hazard Symbol gives us "radioactive, high-voltage, laser-emitting biohazards that coat the floor and make it slippery".
• Art Evolution: Lines in the strips become clearer after the first few hundred strips. Colored comics also decrease in frequency after that point.
• Artistic License – History: For an In-Universe example, "Columbus" has White Hat tell the story of how Christopher Columbus sailed across the ocean to prove the world was round. Of course, people of the time already knew the world was round — they objected to Columbus' voyage not because they thought the world was flat, but because Columbus would surely die at sea because he misunderestimated how long it'd take to get to Japan from Europe. As a result, Megan butts into the story, directing Columbus off to Valinor. When he tells her to stop making stuff up, she responds that he needs to stop making stuff up.
• Art Shift: A few strips actually shift up in terms of quality. The author doesn't seem to have a strong inclination to keep up such things though. On occasion, Randall has created temporary UNIX-themed and 3D-versions of the comic.
  • 1021: "Business Plan" is hand-drawn, like the early strips were.
• Art-Style Dissonance: It's surprisingly smart for its limited art style.
• Asbestos-Free Cereal: The "Free" strip, featuring three brands of cereal, with one of the being asbestos-free! Provides the page image for the trope and is the Trope Namer.
• Asshole Victim: The alt text to to Barnard's Star reads "Ok, team. We have a little under 10,000 years before closest approach to figure out how to destroy Barnard's Star." "Why, does it pose a threat to the Solar System?" "No. It's just an asshole."
• Attention Deficit... Ooh, Shiny!: Likened to a person trying to hold many balloons (a metaphor for tasks) in ADD.
• Author Appeal: Randall seems to really, really like cunnilingus, going so far as to create http://cu.nniling.us/ a redirect to xkcd itself
• Author Avatar: The plain-featured stick man. (Sometimes. It can also be just anyone without special features.) Also, a math teacher with an obsessive fear of velociraptors.
• Author Filibuster: Quite a few on DRM, for example here. Eventually lampshaded here and here. This one provides a similar counterpoint, though it's not exactly a lampshade.
• Author Vocabulary Calendar: Wikipedia's propensity for using specific words over and over is discussed in the strip "Malamanteau".
• Awesome, but Impractical: Marshmallow features the reentry marshmallow toasting module. Attached to a reentry vehicle from a space shuttle or some other source, the reentry marshmallow toasting module extends a stick with a marshmallow attached to toast it from the heat of entering the atmosphere. Marshmallows toasted this way sound impossibly cool, but the method suffers from a couple problems, primarily that the extended arm would cause turbulence that makes steering harder and risks everyone for a fatal crash, and the Alt Text points out that it would be way too easy for the marshmallow to fall off.
• Back-Alley Doctor: In "Doctor's Office", Beret Guy provides some woefully inept medical practice to Cueball, giving him the Monday newspaper crossword instead of medical documentation, giving him pills to get colder, and apparently thinking that doctors are "like librarians, but for your bones and blood". All this is just because he was able to change his house's location type to be a doctor's office on Google Maps, but that doesn't explain how he apparently gets an MRI machine to install there.
• Badass Boast:
  • Margaret makes a Blasphemous Boast to threaten God here.
  • An unnamed biologist also combines this with a Take That! aimed at physics here.
    The heroes of my field have slain one of the four horsemen of the apocalypse, while the heroes of your field gathered in the desert to make a new one.
• Bad Date: One that goes so badly that onlookers start livestreaming it. When the couple discover this, however, they start taking advantage of the situation for the lucrative sponsorship opportunities.
• Bavarian Fire Drill: The point in Trimester is that you can just buy lab coats to fool others.
• Be Careful What You Wish For: In Tower of Babel, the Biblical story goes a bit differently — God is very impressed with the achievement, and offers to give humanity a reward. It so happens that one of the people on top of the tower is a linguist who'd like more languages to study and, well...
• Beware the Nice Ones:
  • In Asshole, our beret-clad Cloudcuckoolander knocks two people away with an excavator because he heard criticisms about what car he drove.
  • Stephenie Meyer. Seriously.
• Big Electric Switch: In Time Machine, the time machine looks like some kind of vending machine with a Big Electric Switch on the front.
• Bilingual Bonus: Assuming you speak Binary... this strip.
  • Each group of four bits represents one nibble (hexadecimal digit): 6261 7365 2032. Each pair of digits is the ASCII code for one character in "base 2".
• Bitter Wedding Speech: Hey, you asked me to do a toast...
• Black Comedy:
  • Ice inverts an urban legend in which a person is drugged, has their kidneys harvested, and is sent to a bathtub filled with ice. The result shown in the strip is, as expected, very gory.
  • Admin Mourning is based on the fact that a person who has died while logged in a Unix-like computer system would still be on the list of running processes. The comic ends with "the ghost in zshell", a pun on Ghost in the Shell and a zshell (a kind of shell in computing).
• Black Speech: "Complex Vowels" reads: "Linguistics tip: Extend the IPA vowel plane along the imaginary axis to produce the complex vowels, cursed sounds which the human mind cannot comprehend."
• Bluff the Eavesdropper: In I Know You're Listening
  Now and then, I announce "I know you're listening" to empty rooms. If I'm wrong, nobody knows, and if I'm right, maybe I just freaked the hell out of some secret organization.
• Body Horror: Subtly implicit in some, such as Eyelash Wish Log. Feb 5: Unlimited Eyelashes Feb 6: That wish granting entities be required to interpret wishes in accordance with the intent of the wisher.
• Boggles the Mind: "Scrabble"; on the prevalence of dirty words you find when playing family games.
• Bookcase Passage: "Bookshelf"; one that activates when you tug on the copy of Atlas Shrugged, though all it does is tell you that you have terrible taste.
• Book Ends:
  • Phobia touches on the fear of snakes, stormchasing and the fact that a storm is picking up snakes (the last one is in the alt-text).
  • The very first strip and the line on the very uttermost right of Click and Drag.
  • Time began and ended with a very small sandcastle.
• Bread, Eggs, Breaded Eggs:
  • This strip tells what's funny this week. Bees, tires, bees with tires, and whatever.
  • "COVID Risk Chart" starts off with ordinary events but then makes absurd combinations out of them. The most obvious example, due to the components' proximity, is "Getting a dental cleaning", "Going on a Tinder date", and "Getting a dental cleaning from a Tinder date".
  • "Probability Comparisons" lists the probability of several events, with some events combining previous events. The earliest set of examples includes guessing someone's birthday, Steph Curry's free throw rate, and Steph Curry guessing your birthday if each guess costs one free throw and he loses if he misses.
  • "Rejected Question Categories" includes categories such as spam ("lonely singles in your area") and phishing ("log into your account by clicking here"). The last category is "?????" and includes a combination of spam, an actual question, and phishing.
    "Hi, we're lonely singles in your area, and we're wondering what would happen if we shot a nuclear bomb into a volcano! Click here to log in and tell us..."
  • Age Milestone Privileges has "25: Rent a car, 30: Run for Senate, 32: Rent a Senator's Car" and combines multiple subjects for year 125: "Drink alcohol^* 21 in an R-rated movie^* 17 while getting a shingles vaccine^* 50 from the President^* 35."
  • "Wikipedia Article Titles" involves the speed at which Randall would click the articles "Meryl Streep", "Seagull", "Meryl Streep (Seagull)", "Meryl Streep Seagull Incident", and a disambiguation page for the latter.
• Brick Joke:
  • I Am Not Good with Boomerangs and Arrow show multiple attempts at throwing a boomerang, with unexpected results. The latter comic also depicts Cueball throwing one without it returning. Several hundred comics later, Cueball shoots an arrow and gets a boomerang in return .
  • The Journal joke, too.
  • Does it count if they're only one comic apart?
  • Then there's the bobcat. The reference in the latter two are in the Alt-Text. It shows up a fourth time in the alt-text of one of the images in this What If feature. He references it again with his 2014 Christmas shopping banner and inverts it in the alt text here.
  • Tetris in Hell and Heaven.
  • In The strip #349, we learn that trying to install FreeBSD has a chance of stranding one in the middle of the ocean. In Click and Drag, we have an ocean somewhere to the right, and there are two stick figures in the middle of it, complaining "Stupid FreeBSD..."
  • ...Which comes up AGAIN even later, as a possible outcome in a "choose your own adventure" style comic.
  • A very subtle one. Hat-Guy has a hat under his hat to one-up those who have their own hats. He shows up as a tiny little figure in a Guest Strip by Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal author Zach Weiner.
  • The What If entry, Drain the World, had the Netherlands taking over the world as a Running Gag. The sequel, Drain the World II showed Mars being turned into "New Netherlands." This was then carried into the main comic, with Exoplanet Names 2 revealing that the Netherlands will continue to expand, establishing "Netherlands VI."
  • "Password Strength" is referenced in the Alt Text for "Brussels Sprouts Mandela Effect"; "I love Brussels Sprouts Mandela Effect. I saw them open for Correct Horse Battery Staple."
  • According to the Alt Text, the man trying to get into porn in "Roger St." is none other than Robert'); DROP TABLE Students;—, from over 500 stripes earlier in "Exploits of a Mom".
• Brown Note: The titular complex vowels in "Complex Vowels", which are incomprehensible cursed sounds made by extending the IPA vowel chart along the mathematical imaginary axis.
• Buffy Speak:
  • Up Goer Five is a cross between this and an inverted Expospeak Gag: it describes a Saturn V rocket using only the 1000 (ten hundred) most-frequently-used words in the English language. Randall followed this up with "Thing Explainer", an entire book in this style.
  • The dialogue in the first three panels of Winter is a complicated way of saying the phrases "The air is cold and the puddles have frozen, but I [Beret Guy] have mittens, the sunlight is warm, and the birds are chirping in the trees."
• Bunnies for Cuteness: According to these three comics, "buns" are invaluably adorable. This comic has Cueball applying for a grant to introduce the pygmy rabbit to the eastern US — but not for any practical reason, just because they're adorable.
• Butt-Dialing Mordor: Parodied here, with a protester shouting "WAKE UP SHEEPLE!", only to accidentally summon actual sheeple, which are horrifying underworld sheep-men monsters.
• Butterfly of Transformation: Transformers plays on the transformation of Transformers and the transformation (metamorphosis) of butterflies.
• But What About the Astronauts?: Addressed in "Nanobots," where a Grey Goo scenario is being observed from the space station.
• Call-Back: Very popular, especially in the Alt Text.
  • In "Useless", an early comic, a heart is inserted into various mathematical formulas ending in question marks. It was captioned "My normal approach is useless here." Five years later in "Probability," he wrote a strip about a terminally ill woman. The Alt Text reads, "My normal approach is useless here, too."
  • Another in "Rogers St." to "Little Bobby Tables" from "Exploits of a Mom."
    • And again in "Exoplanet Names."
  • Also, "Hell" and later, "Heaven."
  • In "A-Minus-Minus," the Black Hat Guy sells an office chair on eBay, only for the actual package to arrive at the purchaser's home a bobcat. 251 comics later in "Packages," one character sets up a script that purchases something random off eBay every day so he can continually receive packages (notice the Alt Text). The bobcat gets mentioned yet again in "Coupon Code" (Alt Text again).
  • In "Barrel - Part 1," the very first comic, a boy starts floating around in a barrel. In "Ferret," the author puts wings on a Ferret hoping he will fly. Eventually, the boy loses the barrel, and 11 comics later, in "Barrel - Part 5," is rescued by the winged ferret.
    • The punchline for "Barrel - Part 1" is reused in "Click and Drag," when you scroll all the way to the right.
  • The man with the loud girlfriend and the elliptical dish from "Loud Sex" gets a mention in the Alt Text from "Bass."
  • In "Forks and Spoons" scientists created fork/spork/spoon hybrids, with disastrous results. Only two comics later they are mentioned again in "Making Hash Browns."
  • The inane statement in "Cat Proximity," "You're a kitty!" gets a callback in the mouseover for "Turtles" — "You're a turtle!".
  • "Marshmallow Gun," where the water gun appears to be the same one from "Philosophy."
  • Black Hat Guy's past exploits are brought up in "Secretary: Part 3."
  • In "Reload," the Alt Text says, "And watch out for that guy from comic #53. ("Hobby").
  • Summer Glau:
    • As a real paladin, he fights in the name of his fair lady in "Venting."
    • He measures things by the silhouette which is always before his eyes in "Converting to Metric."
    • Oh, hey, speaking of cat captions... I IZ "IN UR REALITY!"
  • In "Circuit Diagram," the Alt Text remarks, "I just caught myself idly trying to work out what that resistor mass would actually be, and realized I had self-nerd-sniped." ("Nerd Sniping.")
  • At one point Munroe produced several strips about boomerang hijinks. Then, once we've all forgotten about them, we get this.
  • A very subtle and easily missed one occurs in the Alt Text of "Exploits of a Mom," which references "Pi Equals."
  • The comic Up Goer Five explains a space rocket with only the 1000 most common words used in English. It includes the phrase "you will not go to space today" for when something goes wrong. The What If? blag turned it into a running gag.
  • In "Open Source", fake ninjas attack Richard Stallman in his sleep. Later, during "1337: Parts 4 and 5", he comes to Mrs. Robert aid.
    • "Part 5" also sees the return of Cory Doctorow.
  • In "Just Alerting You" we see someone, possibly an early Megan, riding an Apatosaur. Then, in "Nowhere" we see her again riding an Apatosaur, this time in a daydream.
  • The Tautology Club from "Honor Societies" is referenced in the Alt Text of "Linguistics Club."
  • Hamster Ball 2: "They laughed at me, all those years ago, when I got this human-sized hamster ball. But who's laughing now?!?"^*  "Sounds like the same people. See? There's some of them over there."
  • The "surprise wildlife encounter" suggested as a gift for animal enthusiasts references A-Minus-Minus. Also, for technology enthusiasts, the strip suggests the all-powerful Cybiko® Wireless Handheld Computer for Teens (2000) last seen in Feature Comparison.
  • The Alt Text to "1337 Part 2" says that Elaine Roberts goes by her middle name, because the Alt Text to "Exploits of a Mom" established her first name was "Help I'm trapped in a driver's license factory".
• Call to Adventure: "Interesting Life."
  Megan: You know how some people consider "May you have an interesting life" to be a curse?
  Cueball: Yeah...
  Megan: Fuck those people. Wanna have an adventure?
• The Calls Are Coming from Inside the House: "Modernized" in Campfire, where, in the story, "she" traces the killer's IP address to be 192.168/16. Most home networks behind a router will use an IP address under that range, so this implies that the killer is inside her house.
• Calvinball:
  • Metaball combines a football (or soccer ball) with a basketball hoop and baseball zone rules. The Alt Text further adds golf and ice hockey into the mix.
  • Parameterball appears to be largely based on Tennis, with a twist: the court's size, the height of the net, and the size and density of the ball are randomized throughout the course of one game. One minute, Megan and Cueball are playing Parameterball the size of a table tennis match; the next, Cueball's struggling to get the ball over the net, both of which are taller than he is.
• The Cameo: Hannelore from Questionable Content can be found here.
• Captain Obvious: In #2783, this is apparently what Cueball's astronomy group has been doing: taking easy work by making studies about things that obviously don't exist, among which include "Earthlike stars" and "exoplanets in our solar system".
• Cardiovascular Love: Heart Symbol style with "Binary Heart": Alt Text: i love you.
• Car Fu: Actually Submarine Fu: Black Hat Guy recovers his hat from his Love Interest in this strip by crashing a Russian nuclear submarine through the ice she's skating on.
• Catapult Nightmare: The dream in 806, "Tech Support" starts out as a nightmare, but eventually it gets a Happy Ending. The catapult is still there at the end.
• Centipede's Dilemma: "Did you know November is Tongue Awareness Month?" By being reminded that he has a tongue, Cueball realizes that it's in his mouth, and he doesn't like that.
• Centrifugal Farce: Argues whether or not this should be "centripetal force."
• Characterization Marches On: Early on, Beret Guy was more of an existentialist. He then shifted to being a bartender obsessed with bakeries, before finally settling into his Cloudcuckoolander self with "Pumpkin Carving."
• Chekhov's News: Suggested here to make the news more interesting.
• Chess with Death: In #393, playing games with the dead is just a standard business practice for Death. The late Gary Gygax manages to keep Death away from the office for days via Dungeons & Dragons.
  Gary Gygax: I add the paladin to my party.
  Death: Oh, Jesus. He's getting out another rulebook.
• Chew Bubblegum: Parodied in Bubblegum, where Beret Hat says he came here to chew bubblegum and "make friends".
• Chicken Joke: The Alt Text of this strip, shows how the character who overexplains everything might tell the joke:
  "Why did the chicken cross the road? It begins over five thousand years ago with the domestication of the red junglefowl in southeast Asia and the development of paved roads in the Sumerian city of Ur."
• Children Are Innocent: Subverted in Swimsuit Issue when the child says that he has seen pop-up ads depicting women who are double-penetrated.
• City Noir: The city this Wikipedia talk page is about seems to be this with all its bleak-looking pictures, murders and mining accidents.
• Clap Your Hands If You Believe: Beret Guy seems to somehow change the world around him to the way he naively believes it should work (as with his "business").
• Clickbait Gag:
  • Buzzfeed Christmas reimagines "12 Days of Christmas" as "12 Thing I Actually Got for Christmas":
    "12 best drummers of all time.
    11 pipers whose jaw-droppingly good piping will make you cry.
    You won't believe what these 10 lords leap over."
  • This strip reimagines twentieth-century headlines if they were written to get the most clicks in the internet era, resulting in such classics as "Most Embarrassing Reactions To The Stock Market Crash [gifs]".
• Clingy Aquatic Life: This strip features Napoléon Bonaparte escaping from St. Helena and swimming back to Europe with an octopus clinging to his hat.
• Cloudcuckoolander:
  • Apparently, Summer Glau:
    I eat my body weight in food every thirty-one days. That's slightly faster than the human average. [stares off at the clouds then falls down] I'm part of the floor now.
  • The Beret Guy can count as one as well. He once asked a politician a question and rephrased his way to a request for the politician to see his bug.
  • And maybe Randall himself...
• Coincidental Accidental Disguise: Apparently, having acne on half your face and flipping a coin is enough to fool Batman.
• Comedic Sociopath: Black Hat Guy. In one comic, he says that his pastimes include feeding rocks to children in the park and poking tiny holes in styrofoam noodle cups at the grocery store, and describes himself as a classy asshole, or a "classhole".
• Comically Missing the Point:
  • "Car Problems":
    Megan: [Pointing at an image of a burning car] "Can anyone tell me what's wrong with this picture?"
    Cueball: "The white balance, for one."
    Danish: "Focus is a bit too close."
    Black Hat: "The chromatic aberration suggests you bought your camera because it had 'the most megapixels'."
    Megan: "THE CAR IS ON FIRE!"
    [Offscreen voice] "Maybe you should use the insurance money to get a new camera."
  • In "Paleontology Museum", a museum visitor's reaction to seeing a fossil skeleton is to lament that rocks used to be much more interesting shapes than they are now.
• Comic Sutra:
  • This strip, which illustrates sex positions as numbers but gets increasingly weirder as it goes along.
  • Also seen here, apparently as a result of mistranslations of the original Kama Sutra text.
• Compensating for Something: Parodied in "Red Car"; a character comments on someone driving a bright red car that he's compensating for his cyan penis (red and cyan being on opposite ends of the color wheel). The Alt Text provides another parodied example:
  That guy only drives an alkaline car to overcompensate for his highly acidic penis.
• The Compliance Game: The strip "Board Game" shows Cueball making a board game club do his taxes by presenting them as a board game. According to the Alt Text, they are more thorough than people whose job is to help with filling out tax forms.
• Confronting Your Imposter: A stranger sneaks into the supreme court pretending to be one of the justices, despite all 9 justices present and accounted for. The stranger goes as far as to claim he's either Justice Alito or Ginsburg.
• Continuity Nod: See Call Back.
• Convection, Schmonvection: Floor shows a game of "The floor is lava" taken way too seriously, disregarding the fact that the players would've died very early on if the floor was actually lava.
• Cool Shades: A derivative of this trope (with a reference to the CSI Quip to Black), as seen here.
• Cool Sword: This strip pokes fun at some of the flavors this trope comes in. For example, the salesman says that a dagger glows blue, but only because it's made from actinium, a radioactive element.
• Cordon Bleugh Chef:
  • Apparently, genetic algorithms favor deep-fried Skittles and quail eggs in whipped cream and MSG.
  • Amelia's Farm Fresh Cookies shows the back of a box of cookies, but instead of telling a story, it criticizes the cookies made by the brand's founder's grandmother.
    They have gooey centers, and slightly crisp exteriors, not the other way around, Grandma. There's no mysterious gritty texture. Why would there be?
• Correlation/Causation Gag: Apparently the WHO got the whole "cellphones cause cancer" thing backward.
• Counting Bullets: In a parody of Dirty Harry and Rain Man in this comic.
• Crazy-Prepared:
  • Instead of preparing for a date, a character does extensive research to prepare for a snake attack.
  • Water resistance is apparently a useful factor when buying a flashlight because you may use it to find something underwater.
• Creator's Culture Carryover: The old World According To Americans "map of ignorance/prejudice" gag is subverted when the Americans asked turn out to be "unexpectedly good at geography" and also aware of the holes in their knowledge.
  • This one subverts it by showing that America has not always been considered the centre of the world.
• Creepypasta: Parodied in Late-Night PBS. In the story, the host in Where on Earth Is Carmen Sandiego? keeps asking questions that lead the players to traumatizing locations, and they find Carmen Sandiego behind a Dutch bookcase (a reference to The Diary of a Young Girl). In the end, Rockapella (the band who sang the theme song for Where on Earth Is Carmen Sandiego?) glares at the children until they cry.
• Crossover: xkcd teams up with MinutePhysics to show you how to go to space using the ten hundred words used the most. And there are also In-Universe crossovers:
  • HAL replaces Dave with someone who's more devoted to the whole science thing.
    GLaDOS: But look at us here talking when there's science to do! Goodbye, Dave.
  • Asteroid - also huge Mood Whiplash.
    Alt Text: My Deep Impact/Little Prince crossover fanfic has been poorly received by the community.
• Cruel and Unusual Death: No matter what the rash on your arm may be, Worrying about it is still less terrifying than slipping on a banana peel and getting sucked into an airplane engine.
• Cue O'Clock: There's a wristwatch with Zeppelin O'Clock where the 12 usually goes.
• Cuteness Proximity: Shown in the strip "Cat Proximity", which is the Trope Namer as well.
• Darker and Edgier: Blockbuster Mining introduces blood, explosions and guns to Harriet the Spy in an In-Universe example.
• Deathbringer the Adorable: This chart plots out scary names based on how scary the name is, and how scary the thing itself is. "Chernobyl Packet" and "Bomb Calorimeter" are considered this, while "Soil Liquefaction" and "Grey Goo" are cases of Fluffy the Terrible. "Flesh-Eating Bacteria" is in the corner for Names to Run Away from Really Fast.
• Death by Newbery Medal: Referenced in the Alt Text of this strip.
• Death World: Earth-like Exoplanet. It's theoretically habitable... if you ignore the constant stellar flares, asteroid impacts, acidic oceans, and the fact that it's tidally locked.
  "We're hoping to find biosignatures in the form of screaming."
• Deconstruction:
  • Having to hide the fact that you went on an adventure in The Chronicles of Narnia for seventy years is really not a fun experience.
  • The frog in Video Game/Frogger may actually be a harbinger of traffic accidents.
• A Degree in Useless:
  • According to the Alt Text here, anthropology.
  • As it turns out, it's impossible for experts in literary criticism to spot our impostors in their field.
  • Every Major's Terrible bashes on almost every academic major in the form of a song.
• Deliberate Under-Performance: A student here deliberately tries to fail some of their classes so that their grades are in alphabetical order.
• Demand Overload: In universe. In an strip, a web site announcing the winner of the Compulsive Phone-Checking Championship crashes as a result of all the people checking to see if they won.
• Department of Redundancy Department: The Tautology Club is about redundancy because redundancy is what the Tautology Club is all about.
• Description Cut: Surely Nathan Fillion has better things to do these days than pretend to be Mal Reynolds. Meanwhile, wearing a brown coat, "Name's Captain Reynolds, ma'am." *ahem* "Name's Captain Reynolds, ma'am." Made even funnier by a certain episode of Castle
• Determinator:
  • "He just reconnected the cables we cut, muttering something about "uptime."
  • Not even being frozen in Antarctic ice is enough to keep Napoleon down.
• Devil's Advocate: Invoked but not used here. The trope itself is used without Name Drop in the Wright Brothers example.
  • Invoked and namedropped in this comic.

• Did You Just Scam Cthulhu?: Mephistopheles encounters the E.U.L.A
• Disproportionate Retribution: Some of the many examples.
  • A revenge on a rickroll can cause 363,104 people to watch a haunted video from The Ring.
  • If Black Hat sees a car parked over two spaces, he'll be sure to cut it up with a torch.
  • Miscommunication of a joke can result in a cutting of an arm.
  • In Exoplanet Hi-5, Cueball does the classic "high five; down low; too slow" trick on aliens from Proxima Centauri b, sending the "too slow" message a month before the down-low is expected to come in, as one does in this situation. The aliens react to the prank by sending an intergalactic invasion fleet.

• Dissonant Serenity: "Chess Photo" features someone calmly posing with a chess board in their lap for a roller coaster photo while the other passengers scream their heads off like most people would.
• Distant Reaction Shot: In Tuesdays, Beret Guy's wings grow to the diameter of the earth.
• Distracted from Death: In this strip a guy is so worried about this happening that he forces in sweet last words even when his love interest is just going to the grocery store.
• Dogged Nice Guy: Deconstructed here, with the whole "Nice Guy" situation being played uncharacteristically cynically.
• Don't Explain the Joke: The comic frequently violates this rule. In many cases, the punchline occurs in the second-to-last panel, only to have a final panel that then explains it. Other times the punchline is in the last panel... but there's a final sentence that then explains the joke. On the rare occasion neither are done, you can probably check the Alt Text and find it explained there.
  • The explain xkcd website is Exactly What It Says on the Tin: a wiki solely dedicated to explaining each and every joke and reference in xkcd. Because, you know, Viewers Are Morons.
• Don't Try This at Home: The Alt Text for Wings says to not fly with wings (even if you are hanging from a wire) or else you may die. Subverted in a blog post: "But remember, I am not advocating doing anything dangerous unless it's really cool."
• Doomsday Clock: Disaster strikes when someone moves the short hand one hour forward due to Daylight Saving Time.
• Double-Blind What-If: Discussed in #2149: Alternate Histories, which exaggerates it by having the characters talk about 500 levels worth of hypothetical alternate histories.
• Double Entendre: Geology uses specific terms, such as "spreading," "friction," "cleavage," and "orogeny," to make a point: that it is surprisingly erotic.
• Dream Apocalypse: A character in someone's dream says, "please don't wake up. I don't want to die."
• Droste Image: This. And that - possibly the world's first truly infinite one.
• Drunken Master: The "Ballmer's Peak" shows that you will exhibit superhuman programming powers if you have drunk a specific amount of alcohol.
• Dying Alone: The eventual fate of the Spirit rover, stuck on Mars.
• Early-Installment Weirdness: Newcomers to the series will find it very strange that the first few dozen comics are actually just sketches and philosophical musings set to artwork. It wasn't until around 50 strips in that xkcd as we know it began to surface.
• Earth All Along: The "Time" comic, which updated once an hour for just over four months after posting, is set in some strange world where the inhabitants don't seem to know things that are common knowledge among humans, like how rivers work and why birds chirp. The reveal eventually showed that it's actually set in the distant future of what was once (and will soon become again) the Mediterranean Sea.
• Edit War: Discussed here, concerning the capitalization of Star Trek: Into Darkness. The proposal was to alternate between capital and lowercase letters as a compromise.
• Eldritch Abomination: This is why you shouldn't awaken the sheeple.
• Elemental Powers: Aang may be the master of all four elements, but Dmitri Mendeleev is the master of all 118+.
• Elevator Gag: Floor 5: Zeppelin!
• Enhance Button: Superzoom
• Epic Fail: Best explified in this comic about NASA's New Horizons probe to Pluto, which a comic shows suddenly photographing Earth.
  Male researcher: OK, who did the calculations for the Jupiter slingshot maneuver?
  Female researcher: Dammit, Steve...
• Even Evil Has Loved Ones: Black Hat Guy and his girlfriend
• Even Evil Has Standards:
  • While going over Black Hat Guy's (extensive) criminal record...
    Black Hat Guy: I plead the third.
    Congresswoman: You mean the fifth.
    Black Hat Guy: No, the third.
    Congresswoman: ...You refuse to quarter troops in your house?
    Black Hat Guy: I have few principles, but I stick to them.
  • The Black Hat Man's companion does not condone his participation in the My Lai massacre.
• Evolutionary Levels: Parodied in "Evolving", which uses a Pokémon style cut scene to show a disease-causing bacterium evolving into a drug-resistant variant.
• Exactly What I Aimed At: Apollo retroreflectors.
• Exact Words: A Feature Comparison of various communication services advertises that the Cybiko® Wireless Handheld Computer for Teens (2000) has wireless message delivery without internet, which only SMS also has. This is true... but only because the Cybiko communicates with radio, and so the "advantage" it has means that you can't message anyone who's too far away, a problem that none of the other services have.
• Expert in Underwater Basket Weaving: "Every Major's Terrible" is a Take That! to nearly every academic major for training students to have completely useless skills and knowledge. The only one not insulted is engineering.
  Though physics seems to promise you a Richard Feynman-like career, the wiki page for "Physics Major" redirects to "Engineer."
• Expospeak Gag: Somehow both inverted and played straight in the book Thing Explainer, where everything is explained in Buffy Speak— which can be thick enough to obfuscate what it's talking about. Standout examples include the "Sky Boat with Turning Wings" (helicopter), the "Shape Checker" that checks whether you have a piece of metal with a certain shape (cylinder lock), the "Box that Cleans Food Holders" (dishwasher), and the "Big Tiny Thing Hitter" (Large Hadron Collider).

F-J

• Facepalm: "Local g" offers an example (last panel).
• Failure Is the Only Option: This flow chart explains how to write good code, or possibly not.
• Fake-Out Opening: "The remaining 90 minutes of the movie will be a romantic comedy."
• False Cause: Several, though it is discussed here.
  • Firefox and Witchcraft, as pointed out by Microsoft and the Christian Church.
  • Cancer causes cellphones, though he is willing to reconsider with more data.
  • A web site's visitors with Martha Stewart Living subscribers, and the Furry Fandom.
• False Dichotomy: "Charity" discusses this.
• Fantasy Keepsake: This deconstruction of a Summon Everyman Hero fantasy — the protagonist has a thank-you gift which proves to him, but wouldn't prove to anyone else, that his adventures in another world were real.
• Fantasy Twist: This strip takes it to a very weird place.
• "Far Side" Island: If this strip is to be trusted, they're not half as boring as they're stereotyped.
• Feghoot
  • 90 years worth of predictions for the future... only to end in an extremely lame meme.
  • Lampshaded, then subverted here.
• Fetish Retardant: In-Universe, the Power Rangers theme is this.
• Filler Strip: Parodied.
• Flatworld: Here, in a reference to Flatland. (Bonus points for the Alt Text pointing out what a stick figure would look like in Flatland according to the book.)
• Flanderization: #2832 is dedicated to a "typical urban planning opinion progression" regarding car-centric land development as opposed to cycling-centric development. It starts out with various characters having car-centric views and/or inexperience with the topic,^note "I wish there wasn't so much traffic to get into the city. They should put in more lanes", then developing conclusions that car-centricism is self-defeating and unsustainable.^note "Widening roads to speed up traffic makes them more dangerous to walk near, making walking more dangerous and creating more traffic." From that, the progression starts to devolve from reasonable conclusions against car-centricism to car-hating craziness, punctuated with Black-and-White Insanity by pitting drivers against everyone else, patriotic fervor for the bicycle-friendly Netherlands from a person who isn't a native Nederlander, and suggestions for city council to scatter tire spikes onto roads.
• Flock of Wolves: What are the odds of five Ayn Rand fans being on the same train together?
• Flying Seafood Special: In "Click and Drag," a birdwatcher spots a giant jellyfish floating by.
• Forgotten Framing Device: The "1337" storyline begins with a guy getting foiled by a mother when trying to leech off her Wi-Fi and seques into his friend telling him about how the mother is only the second-greatest hacker compared to her daughter, Elaine. By the time we get to the end of Elaine's story, the two guys are never mentioned again.
• Formula for the Unformulable: In cartoon "Useless", the author has tried to calculate the square root, cosine, derivative, and various increasingly complex mathematical operations on a love heart, and concluded that "My normal approach is useless here."
• Four-Point Scale: Strip 1098 explains the trope.
• Fox-Chicken-Grain Puzzle:
  • Done with a wolf, goat and cabbage, it ends halfway through when the problem solver leaves the wolf behind, questioning why he had a wolf in the first place. The Alt Text goes a step further asking why there was a cabbage, taking only the goat, goats are fine.
  • Revisited later on with even more wolves, goats, and cabbages. And it just keeps escalating.
• Funny Background Event:
  Bobby: Mom, I'm hungry.
  Mrs. Roberts: Hush, I'm coding. You ate yesterday.
• Fun with Homophones: #1704 takes quotes with the words "no man" and replaces them with "Gnome Ann".
• Fun T-Shirt: The trend of shirts featuring "witty" sayings of the misanthropic persuasion is deconstructed in "T-Shirts". Ironically, the second-to-last one ended up becoming official XKCD merchandise.
• Gaslighting: AKA Stealth Carpentry.
• Geeky Turn-On: Frequent, though with occasional unfortunate Manic Pixie Dream Girl overtones.
• Genre Shift: The remaining 90 minutes of the movie will be a romantic comedy.
• Giant Spider: While surprisingly literate, they aren't so good at pretending to be human.
• Gift of the Magi Plot: Inverted with 506: Theft of the Magi. Black Hat and his girlfriend both sold each others' possessions on the internet (his Xbox 360 and her roomba), using the money to buy themselves gifts (a copy of Left 4 Dead for Xbox and a roomba dueling harness) that are useless without the item that the other sold off.
• Gift Shake: Strip 1151 has a variation, where Megan soaks her presents first in purple dye and then in pink — a procedure used in biological research to sort bacteria into one of two primary types, gram-positive and -negative, based on whether their cells walls bond with the purple dye or not — and announces that none of the presents are gram-negative. Cueball remarks that he wishes she hadn't opened the home biology kit first.
• Girl in the Tower: This girl wants to be a lighthouse keeper because she gets to be the girl in the tower, only she's the one saving people.
• Girl on Girl Is Hot: Go go Gadget two lesbians doing it.
• Giving Up on Logic: Computer problems make a character pretty much drop the trope name here. (Not a Trope Namer though, as the trope existed for years before that comic.)
• Glasses Pull: There are multiple instances of characters putting on a pair of sunglasses for emphasis just before a particularly dreadful pun, namely Rick Astley in 524: Party, Isaac Newton in 626: Newton and Leibniz, and the alt text in 977: Map Projections.
• Glass-Shattering Sound: Attempted. In Megan's attempt to break glass with her voice, she accidentally turns the water inside into blood.
• Global Ignorance: 850: "World according to Americans" actually subverts this. Whoever made the map was expecting them to fail horrendously, but instead just so happened to choose a group of Americans that just came out of a geography bee, according to the alt text, and as such they were able to mark down an imperfect but generally accurate map of the world.
• A God Am I:
  • 676: The result of realizing how much computing power is available to the average person.
  • 505: Speculating that a deity might be creating the universe out of boredom.
• Godwin's Law:
  • Referenced and parodied in this strip.
  • Also, the suggested a screen consisting entirely of Hitler's face with flashing eyes would be preferable to Vista.
  • Done in the Alt Text of this strip.
    The establishment doesn't take us seriously. You know who else they didn't take seriously? Hitler. I'll be like him, but a GOOD guy instead of...
  • In "Every Major's Terrible" the singer compares choosing an academic major to Sophie's Choice.
• Golden Mean Fallacy:
  • Played for laughs here, in which Cueball tries to propose to 9/11 conspiracy theorists a compromise between their beliefs and what is commonly believed: the government plotted to crash one plane into the towers, while terrorists actually did crash the second plane. The Alt Text explicitly states: "I believe the truth always lies halfway between the most extreme claims."
  • "Daylight Saving Choice" has the apparent resolution between people liking/hating daylight saving time: everyone who likes it should use it, and everyone who hates it shouldn't. Of course, since Black Hat is the one announcing it, you can assume this solution will cause maximum chaos: if everyone's using their own preference of daylight saving time or not, then that makes coordinating time way harder since nobody can agree on what time is when.
• Gone Horribly Right: The result of trying to be "the Walmart of social interaction" is...
• Gone Horribly Wrong: In this strip, upgrading a computer leads to being stranded out in the middle of the ocean.
• A Good Name for a Rock Band:
  • Megan mentions that raccoons have gotten into her attic and started a "raccoon sex dungeon"; Cueball responds by stating it would make for a good Tumblr URL, with the subtitle mentioning that doing so has been steadily replacing how often he states that a phrase in question "would be a good name for a band". (Inverted in the Alt Text: "Dot Tumblr Dot Com" would not make A Good Name for a Rock Band, due to potential confusion about its website.)
  • Gets skewered here, as well.
  • The Alt Text of this strip features a double whammy, part of which is a callback to an earlier strip.
• Goofy Feathered Dinosaur: This strip lampoons the concept of harmless avian dinosaurs by denoting that if someone believes in the trope, you can tell they've never picked a fight with an ostrich.
• Government Conspiracy: This open letter to whatever group or groups are secretly controlling the U.S. government telling them to get their shit together, it's embarrassing.^note Referring to the 2013 government shutdown.
• Gratuitous Iambic Pentameter: Strip 79, "Iambic Pentameter".
• The Ground Is Lava: Subverted in "Floor", where the children apply volcano management techniques to the game. Namely, blowing up a wall to redirect the flow, using running water to lower the temperature, and calling for helicopters.
• Grub Tub: In #1092, Megan and Cueball try to catch Olympic swimmer Michael Phelps by dumping Jello into the pool. According to the Alt Text, he promptly eats all of it in a short time.
• Guest Strip: A week full of them, by the authors of Questionable Content, Buttercup Festival, Overcompensating, Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, and FoxTrot. Yes, Bill Amend did a guest strip.
• Happy Birthday to You!: "Birthday" has the lyrics to the Happy Birthday song, in celebration of both the comic's 10th anniversary and the court ruling Warner/Chappell's claim to the song invalid a day prior. In the strip's Alt Text, Randall mentions that he should apologize to his family and friends, along with the Chuck E. Cheese's staff, for having called the cops on them every time they sang the song.
• Hard on Soft Science: With some frequency. It also appears in the warning at the bottom of each page.
  • Homeopathy is a soft target.
  • Inverted in "Degree-Off," with a biologist giving a physicist a The Reason You Suck speech.
• Has Two Thumbs and...: Used in the Alt Text for Things You Learn.
• He Also Did: invokedParodied in "Mainly Known For", in which Megan knows several famous people by some of their least prominent traits, from Steve Jobs being "the Pixar guy" to George W. Bush being "Jenna Bush's dad".
• He Knows Too Much: What happens when you catch Black Hat Guy and his girlfriend together.
• "Help! Help! Trapped in Title Factory!":
  • How someone got trapped in a universe factory, we'll never know.
  • Also used in the Alt Text to "Exploits of a Mom".
• Hitler's Time Travel Exemption Act:
  • Black Hat Guy uses a one-time-only time machine to go back and kill Hitler, at his friend's insistence. Only he did it in 1945, in the bunker, which is when and where Hitler actually died.
  • Beret Guy also travels through time to kill Hitler. He finds it easier than expected because he traveled to the future by hiding in a time capsule.
    Beret Guy: Anyway, I'm here to kill Hitler.
    Ponytail: But he died long ago!
    Beret Guy: Oh, good! That was easy.
  • In this strip, one of the main character's future selves traveled back in time to kill Hitler, but they got the year way off, traveling to the present day instead of the 1900's.
• Hoist by His Own Petard: "I just caught myself idly trying to work out what that resistor mass would actually be, and realized I had self-nerd-sniped." In-Universe, the strip just before that one.

• Home-Early Surprise: Parodied in "Scheduling," in which this scenario goes in a wildly different direction.
• How We Got Here: Subverted in this one. It starts with a Record Needle Scratch over a chaotic scene, but rather than say something like "You're probably wondering how I ended up in this situation", it says "You're probably wondering what that sound was. Well, long ago, music was recorded on vinyl discs..."
• Hurricane of Euphemisms: In "City Nicknames," Black Hat Guy reels off endless, completely made-up nicknames for St. Louis ("The Winged City. The Golden Trombone. Castleopolis. The Kissing Kingdom. Sandland. The High Place. Ol' Ironhook. ...")
  Megan: How long does this last?
  Ponytail: No city has ever let him stay long enough to find out.
• I Ate WHAT?!: In "Capri Suns", a bag of IV fluid is consumed like a Capri Sun. The saltiness of the "drink" was brought up. The alt text suggests that the doctors called for security after noticing the scene.
• Icarus Allusion: #1110, "Click and Drag", mentions Icarus. Really, it does. You'll have to look hard, though.
• I'd Tell You, but Then I'd Have to Kill You: Well, kill you even sooner.^note You'll be moved up from 49 of ~7 billion to 31 of ~7 billion.
• Impossibly-Compact Folding: The "retractable rocket", which doesn't take off — it just extends itself upwards until it's tall enough to reach the ISS^note  about 250 miles, if you're wondering, then retracts back down again.
• In Case of X, Break Glass: In case of emergency, a glass repair kit.
• Incredibly Obvious Bomb: It comes with a ''radioactive'' label.
• Infinite Canvas: Several of the comics, but taken to the extreme with Click and Drag.
• Information Wants to Be Free: With a mythological twist.
• Inherently Funny Words: The xkcd "blag."
• Insane Troll Logic: All over the place:
  • "Just talk to them like a fucking human being." "Nah, that's a sucker's game!"
  • Face it—I'm your statistically significant other.
  • "Why are you carrying a chin-up bar?" ... "I'm not really a not-carrying-a-chin-up-bar person."
• Insignificant Little Blue Planet: Spoofed in Pale Blue Dot when the audience complains about the "blue dot" being an artifact on the photo.
• Instant A.I.: Just Add Water!: Very easy on Python! (As usual, Alt Text explains how.)
• The Internet Is an Ocean: There's a "Map of the Internet" depicting it as an archipelago in strip 802.
• In the Style of: Many of his parodies fit this trope a little closer.
• Inverted Trope: Well, if it were a trope...
• "It" Is Dehumanizing: Some jerkass uses this on a furry in "Aversion Fads."
• It Meant Something to Me: The spambot.
• I Thought Everyone Could Do That: Beret Guy is surprised to learn that other people can't tell what atoms are in objects just by looking at them. He wonders, "How do you tell what things are?"
• It's Been Done: In "Washing Machine Settings", Cueball muses about the exact meaning of the settings on his washing machine and comes up with an idea for a website where people document all this stuff for reference. As the caption points out, the instruction manual should already have that covered.
• It Was His Sled: invokedParodied in Spoiler Alert, in which Randall takes three common-knowledge spoilers: Snape, Trinity, and Rosebud kill Dumbledore, die in a hovercraft crash, and was Kane's sled, respectively, and then combines them into "Snake kills Trinity with Rosebud". The Alt Text goes a step further: Tyler Durden was both characters.
• I Want My Jetpack:
  • Replace "jetpack" with "flying car" and the trope name's quoted word-for-word.
  • The Alt Text here starts with the trope name, but then Epic Fail happens.
  • 2016 Conversation Guide discusses the trope.
• I Will Find You: Find You
• Jackass Genie: The genie in "Wish Interpretation" explictly warns he'll twist wishes to teach people a lesson. But Black Hat wishes for things that are so obviously destructive without any creative twisting, the genie gets discouraged and offers to just give him 20 dollars if he'll go away.
• Jerkass: Black Hat Guy.
• Jerk with a Heart of Gold: "No One Must Know."
• "Jump Off a Bridge" Rebuttal: If all his friends jumped off a bridge it's probably because something bad is happening, like the bridge is on fire.
• Jump Physics: Hoverboard is an interactive comic where you can move around with a hoverboard. It has all the classic platformer-physics in action. Also, you can jump arbitrary times in the air.
• Jumping the Shark: Played with In-Universe in this strip's Alt Text.

K-O

• Kangaroos Represent Australia: A not-so-subtle instance in Thing Explainer. In a map of the Earth, Australia is simply labeled "Big Animals with Pockets."
• Kid Hero All Grown-Up: In this strip. Kid hero goes to another dimension, saves a kingdom, and now has to live with that knowledge for the rest of his life here on boring ol' Earth.
• Kidnapped for Experimentation: Implied in Selection Effect.

Ponytail: Our research shows that compared to the overall population, people who agree to participate in scientific studies are significantly less likely to call the police to rescue them from our lab.

Alt Text: fMRI testing showed that subjects who don't agree to participate are much more likely to escape from the machine mid-scan.

• Know Your Vines: Relationship after camping trip: strained.
• Laborious Laziness: Sometimes optimizing efficiency, automating a task, or figuring out the best approach takes more time and effort than just plowing ahead.
• Lame Pun Reaction: #2312:

  Person 1: Doesn't Planck yeast rise on its own?
  Person 2: Yeah, that's what makes quantum foam. But data suggests our universe is flat. String theory says it's because spacetime has unleavened dimensions.
  Person 3: ...I hate you.

• Leaning on the Fourth Wall:
  • The Alt Text gag from #721 only works on the assumption that people in the xkcdverse really are stick figures.
  • The punchline of #1054 depends entirely on you reading the speech bubbles instead of imagining them as spoken dialogue.
• Leaving Food for Santa: Often lampooned.
  • "Santa" questions the logistics of this practice, pointing out that if Santa eats a cookie for every few houses he visits, that would add up to hundreds of tons of food, so he would have to poop them out somewhere during the night.
  • "Santa Facts" and its Alt Text mention that Santa's natural diet is actually reindeer meat, and that the milk and cookies are actually integrated to his diet via an aggressive public campaign.
• Leeroy Jenkins: In "Think Logically", an amateur Chess player assumes that since the goal of the game is to checkmate the enemy king, constantly moving your pieces towards the king is the only sensible strategy.
• Left Hanging: "The Race" series, featuring Firefly actors, which abruptly ended just before the main character and Nathan Fillion duke it out, mocking Firefly's abrupt cancellation.
• Let's See YOU Do Better!: "Long Light" has a driver complaining about a long red light, and the engineer who designed the intersection jumps onto his car telling him how hard it was to work out the light timings with the nearby intersections to prevent a total traffic jam, but obviously the driver must have a better plan for the lights than him. The punch line is that the red light won't change until Tuesday, meaning the engineer has royally screwed up.

• Literal-Minded:
  • "Shake what your mama gave you!" This prompts Megan not to keep dancing, but to go home and handle a gift from her mother very vigorously.
  • In Cuisine, Cueball prepares some fusion cuisine. No, not mixing multiple cultures' techniques to create food; he's using heavy water to create nuclear fusion.
• The Little Shop That Wasn't There Yesterday:
  • "Startup Opportunity" ponders the idea of disrupting the industry of these kinds of shops. Also, Beret Guy says he gets his groceries from them.
  • In this strip, Beret Guy believes he bought a cursed desk chair from one of these, as the place was boarded up when he tried to return it. When Cueball points out that a lot of shops are currently boarded up due to coronavirus, Beret Guy becomes convinced that the curse must have caused the virus, and he can end the pandemic by destroying the chair.
    Beret Guy: Die, plague-bringer!
    Cursed Chair:    Hee hee I can not die   
  • "Curbside" has Beret Guy contacting the shop about getting an amulet to fight ghosts, and some groceries. However, he changes his mind after they explain they don't do curbside pickup, and he's not willing to take the risk.
• "London, England" Syndrome: Poked fun at in "No, The Other One", which showcases a map of American cities and towns that have the same names as their much more well-known counterparts.
• Logic Bomb: Used several times, but this one's for the audience.
• Logical Fallacies:
  • An intentional example in "Extrapolation."
  • Lampshaded here, in the "Principle of Explosion" comic.
• Loophole Abuse:
  • "There's no rule on the books saying a meerkat can't play rugby." Though, according to the Alt Text, there are rules against gorillas and golden retrievers.
  • In one of Black Hat's schemes, he takes the observation that standard internet server racks and beehive frames are both 19 inches and have similar pitches and runs with it, noting that most web hosting TOSes^* Terms of Service don't mention beehives in what's not allowed. The Alt Text calls back to the example listed above, noting that most TOSes also don't prevent dogs from playing baseball in the server facility.
  • Played With in #1593, where Beret Guy seems to believe that stealing a base in baseball is loophole abuse. His reaction is, "Everyone's real mad but I guess they checked the rules and there's nothing that says he can't do that."
• Loud of War: Several strips have featured inventive audio revenge on loud car stereos and neighbours who are loud in bed.
• Lousy Lovers Are Losers: The punchline of this strip, where reporters gather to talk to a scientist who claims the G-Spot doesn't exist, only to find they're interviewing the wrong scientist.
  Reporter: Is it true you've been unable to find evidence that the G-spot exists?
  Scientist: My research is in solar cells. I think you have the wrong press conference.
  [Beat]
  Scientist: [hanging his head in defeat] But... yes.
• Love Allegory: Katamari.
  • Also, "Our love is like a Brontosaurus."
• Magical Particle Accelerator: Not surprisingly, Large Hadron Collider. The bored scientists use it to give a helicopter cancer.
• Major General Song: "Every Major's Terrible," which is about choosing a course and how the person can't/won't/doesn't want to do any of them. Someone sang the whole comic (with accompaniment) here.
  • Note that the video was released within hours of the comic. Say what you will about XKCD's fandom, but damn.
• Making a Spectacle of Yourself: New Year's Eve Party concerns those fancy novelty glasses shaped like the year number that you'll see during New Year's. Cueball went the extra mile and got laser eye surgery patterned in the same way instead, and is having trouble seeing with it as one might expect.
• Manic Pixie Dream Girl: Most characters in the strip, male and female, have a strong devotion to making life a little weirder from the start, including Black Hat Guy, so at least by real-world standards, the recurring female character can come off as one, such as in #308.
  • The appeal of this trope is parodied in comic 122: "I didn't actually mean be different. I just want silly and entertaining on command now and then."
• Marrying the Mark: Exaggerated when a football player somehow manages to insert an entire fake relationship into a misdirection play — taking the other player all the way to a fake wedding before finally revealing the deception and dashing unimpeded to the end zone while the erstwhile groom looks on in shock.
• The Masochism Tango: Black Hat Guy and his girlfriend. He blew up her car, for Chrissakes. By moving the mines she had set up to blow up his car. She stole his hat. He likes his hat.
• Measuring the Marigolds: Subverted in "Beauty." Yes, scientists find beauty and wonder in their work. It's just not always what everyone else thinks of as beautiful.
• Megaphone Gag: Strip #81 "Attention, shopper" (the page image) shows Black Hat holding a golf club and announcing over a megaphone that an expensive car in the parking lot was just smashed by a golf club.
• Mighty Glacier: Used literally in "Digital Rights Management."
  Black Hat Guy: Let's make a deal. You stop trying to tell me where, when, and how I play my movies and music, and I won't crush your homes under my inexorably advancing wall of ice.
• Mind Screw:
  • Here. Just so you understand how weird this is, the guy on the right is talking to the past, and it's talking back.
  • This strip starts out fairly normal. Then the whole world falls apart all of a sudden.
  • The small print about "the algorithm" on the home page might also qualify as either an example or a parody:
    We did not invent the algorithm. The algorithm consistently finds Jesus. The algorithm killed Jeeves.^note In context, possibly a reference to the search engine rather than the hypercompetent valet. The algorithm is Banned in China. The algorithm is from Jersey. The algorithm constantly finds Jesus. This is not the algorithm. This is close.
  • The story behind that is as follows: In 2007, some billboards popped up in New York with those sentences on them, as part of an apparent viral marketing campaign by ask.com. However, they apparently didn't finish it; the phrases didn't return anything relevant on Google. Randall decided to exploit this by having the many bloggers in his fanbase post the sentences as links to xkcd.com. He added them to the site itself so that the effort wouldn't be misinterpreted as an attempted Googlebomb. It worked; if you Google the phrases, the top results are all references to xkcd.
  • "Perhaps this could change your mind?" It's like something straight out of The Twilight Zone.
• Mix-and-Match Critters: The Omnitaur from the titular strip is a beast that comprises the cross sections of the following (from front-to-back): a bird, a human, a ram, a leopard, a horse, a dragon, a bull, a shark, a snake, a lion, and a fish.
• Mood Whiplash: Too many to fully enumerate. Some examples:
  • A sad shift from something romantic to the complete opposite.
  • "Dark Flow" segues from a Your Mom gag to something rather heartbreaking.
• Moon-Landing Hoax: A few comics about the topic.
• More than Three Dimensions: In strip #721, Cueball apologizes to a two-dimensional square named A. Square for having given him a hard time when he had trouble understanding three-dimensional space. Playing a four-dimensional game called Miegakure has made Cueball more sympathetic to Square's situation.
• Motive Decay: The second Manhattan Project starts out as an attempt to cure cancer, but ends up replicating the original Manhattan Project exactly.
• Mouse World: Those aren't dandelions; they're the field mice's wind turbines.
• Mugging the Monster: A pick-up artist attempts to 'neg' Black Hat Guy's girlfriend. It doesn't go well for him.
• Mundane Made Awesome: In the xkcd-Verse, computer science is revered as if it were a martial art. The 1337 story arc is a good example.
  • Making a sandwich! AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHH!!!!
• Mundane Utility:
  • Frequently, including lasers to zap squirrels.
  • Also, using the LHC to cause cancer in helicopters.
  • Possibly the worst one yet: using Narnia as a literal garbage dump.
  • An alternative explanation for the 26-second pulse on seismometers is that a long time ago, seismologists killed a giant and buried it in the sea, using its still-beating heart to... synchronize seismometers.
• Mundane Wish: Done in this strip.
• Must Be Invited:
  • In the Alt Text of this strip, COVID social distancing practices are likened to the myth that vampires need to be invited into a house. In this case, just because you invite a vampire in, doesn't mean they're going to step foot inside your "haunted plague box".
  • In what might be a Call-Back, this strip has the female character conflate public health rules with common courtesy by claiming that now that she's vaccinated against COVID-19, she can visit a stranger's house freely. Her confusion continues in the Alt Text when the homeowner objects, and she thinks they've mistaken her for a vampire that needs an explicit invitation.
    Homeowner: You still can't walk into someone's house without being invited!
    Woman: What? Oh, I see your confusion. No, this vaccine is for a bat virus. I'm fine with doorways and garlic and stuff.
• My Grandson, Myself: Implied by the Alt Text of "Mystery Solved," which claims that "Jimmy Hoffa currently heads the Teamsters Union — he just started going by 'James'." (Jimmy Hoffa's son James P. Hoffa is the actual current head of the Teamsters Union.)
• My New Gift Is Lame: "Oceanography Gift" has Cueball prepare "these water molecules" as a birthday gift. The upside is that sending the gift to someone who lives on the coast is as trivial as pouring water into an ocean 10 years in advance; the downside is that giving someone the most common molecule on Earth is extremely lame, and the recipient is not even going to get all those molecules since they're going to be spread out over the entire ocean. For an inversion of this trope, Megan seems absolutely touched by the molecules Cueball gave her.
• Nameless Narrative: Most of the names of recurring characters were never clearly stated.
  • Averted with 'Megan'
  • The alt text of the Actuarial strip names the Black Hat Guy as "Hat guy."
  • The Author Avatar may be named Rob.
• Never Bareheaded: Black Hat Guy. Except the one time his hat was stolen.
• Never My Fault: The amateur Chess player in "Think Logically" attributes being beaten by a more experienced player to Chess being a badly-designed game.
• Newhart Phonecall: This one. Lampshaded by the Alt Text.
• The New '20s: Discussed in the January 1, 2020 strip, leading to an argument about when a new decade actually begins. Ultimately resolved based on VH1's authority.
• Nightmare Fuel: Velociraptors, In-Universe.
• Ninja Pirate Zombie Robot:
  • "Comic Fragment". God knows how it all fits together, but it sounds great.
  • Examined further in "Trochee Fixation."
• No Man of Woman Born: No man can kill him. Well, Gnome Ann can.
• Nonhuman Undead: The Opportunity Rover evolved into this.

• Noodle Incident:
  • Also, he somehow managed to go from upgrading a computer to being stranded out in the middle of the ocean surrounded by sharks.
  • Then we have #521. Start with trying to one-up some christmas light displays on Youtube. End up fighting raptors with lightsabers, Bill Gates killing Santa, and finally cutting down the Yggdrasil as a Christmas tree.
  • And however he lost his genetics, rocketry, and stripping licenses in one go.
  • The "Apollo 12 rum incident" seems to qualify. No consensus has been reached yet about the nature of said incident, how it relates to harpoons, or whether it actually happened or was made up by Randall.
  • In City Talk Pages the actual contents of the said Wikipedia article is this; the talk page describes various weird events happening, including a complaint from Voltaire, remarks on how the page image contains an in-progress murder, the article apparently taking a stance on correct condom use, and an Edit War breaking out between an editor and the murderer. The contents and edit history of the city are left up to the imagination.
  • Another Wikipedia example: Wikipedia Article Titles suggests that Randall isn't very interested in reading the pages for Meryl Streep or seagulls, but some kind of unexplained "Meryl Streep Seagull Incident" would pique his curiosity, especially if it was a disambiguation page, implying multiple seagull incidents.

• Nostalgia Filter: In Morning News, a younger person assumes that journalism before the Internet was less damaging to her brain, and that newspapers had much better and more thoughtful opinions; an older woman agrees on the condition that they not go look at old newspapers to verify it.
• Number Obsession: One specific example is the narrator of the strip "Alone" who describes himself as feeling distant from most people because he's always abstracting numbers and patterns, and falls in love with a woman because the pattern of her touches is the Fibonacci sequence.
• Occam's Razor: Parodied, naturally. According to Megan, the simplest explanation to the Barber Paradox is that Occam shaves the barber.
• Office Sports: What programmers get up to while their code's compiling.
• Off the Chart:
  • This comic describing The Star Wars Holiday Special; not just bad, not even So Bad, It's Good, just a bottomless abyss.
  • This comic says "Logarithmic scales are for quitters who don't bother with getting enough paper to display their charts properly".
• Off the Rails: In Outbreak, Cueball and Megan derail the Zombie Apocalypse by promptly killing Patient Zero and destroying all the Toxin X-7 they've created.
• Oh, Crap!:
  • As said by Michael Phelps when the boxes of Jell-o mix get wheeled in while he's swimming.
  • December 25th Launch has ground control prepare for a rocket to launch, only for Santa to come into range. Cue an "Oh no." from one of the personnel.
• Old People are Nonsexual: In "Ages" people 55 and up are marked with "more sex than anyone is comfortable admitting".
• Old School Introductory Rap: In "Open Mic Night", two very nerdy rappers go up with raps in the following format: "I'm M.C. [scientific concept] and I'm here to say [line that self-demonstrates the concept]". E.g. "M.C. Aphasia" goes on to incoherently mumble words after introducing herself (aphasia is a language disorder).
• Old Shame: In-Universe In Old Files, Cueball has this reaction to looking through his high school work and discovering he wrote poetry. The Alt Text has him finding an Animorphs fanfic and quickly deleting it.
• Older Is Better: This comic shows that older technology is still very useful, and can't be completely replaced by every new technology.
• Older Than They Think: In-Universe. With the rapid pace of technology and information, everyone assumes that conversation is dying, newspapers are becoming sensationalist garbage, the sanctity of marriage is being threatened, society is collapsing, and things were better in the old days. This comic shows that people have been believing this for over a century.
• On a Scale from One to Ten: Parodied with the Universal Rating Scale, which mashes together the 1-10 rating scale (with 0 and 11 included for good measure), the five-star rating scale, the American movie rating system, the American education grade system, the IUCN Red List categories, and the Starbucks cup size chart, among others.
• One-Word Title: Although whether or not "xkcd" is a word is a matter of opinion.
• Only the Chosen May Wield:
  • Deconstructed in "Sword in the Stone". Megan pulls out a sword out of the stone, and thus is crowned the ruler of England, but then she decides to put the sword back in because she doesn't want the burden of having to rule a kingdom.
    "That seems like an awful lot of hassle when all I wanted was a cool sword."
  • Parodied in "Sword Pull". A guy pulls a sword from a stone, but the sword doesn't budge completely; instead, the stone starts up and begins to slowly move across the ground like a lawnmower.
• Ontological Mystery: #505 starts with this, and then puts another layer on top.
• The Operators Must Be Crazy: #1438 posits what would happen if mission control acted like indifferent telephone service operators during the Apollo 13 disaster; the operator doesn't care about their emergency, makes snarky comments when they try to explain their plight, and brushes them off in favor of a call from his mother.
• Organ Theft: Inverted in #914. His ice is stolen... and he wakes up in a bathtub full of kidneys, rather than the other way 'round.
• Orphaned Etymology: Etymology raises the question of what a falcon is in Star Wars.
• Overcomplicated Menu Order: Xkcd orders $15.05 worth of appetizers, expecting the waiter to figure out what quantities of which items to serve in order to reach that number. The joke is that the costs listed on the menu just happen to mean that the waiter is being asked to solve a complex mathematical problem.
• Overflow Error:
  • A character gets thrown off by this while Counting Sheep, causing their mental image of the whole herd to stampede in the opposite direction. Whether it's a bigger problem to have one's brain throw an overflow error or to be awake even after 32,767 sheep^note (the limit of a signed 16-bit integer) is anyone's guess.
  • "Depth" features 32,767 angels dancing on the head of a pin- one more and they'd become 32,768 devils.
• Overly-Long Gag:
  • On TV Tropes
  • Significant, which even combines this with Overly Pre-Prepared Gag.
  • Expect to burst out laughing several times during #1110. Not from the little tidbits in it, but from scrolling through it and finding you're still scrolling but it's not ending!
    • That or simply stare in awe with mouth agape while thinking about how long that had to have taken to make...
  • Many pages in the What-If blog have these, but this one deserves a special mention, combining this with a constantly returning Brick Joke.
    White Hat Guy: I even tried making a big show of putting on headphones, but he just KEPT TALKING.
• Overly Narrow Superlative:
  • "I love you most out of all the girls in all the world who love me back."
  • Subverted in Bill Amend's guest strip:
    Alt Text: Guest comic by Bill Amend of FoxTrot, an inspiration to all us nerdy-physics-majors-turned-cartoonists, of which there are an oddly large number.
  • The Alt Text of #802 mentions that Farmville is "the second-biggest browser-based social-networking-centered farming game in the WORLD".
  • #2274: "That star is Vega. At magnitude 0.03, it's the brightest star I'm currently talking about."
• Overly Pre-Prepared Gag:
  • Just shy of a hundred years of Googled predictions for the future, until you get to 2101.
  • Time may count as both this and Overly-Long Gag: the image on the strip page changes every hour, forming a stop-motion video with narrative when combined on external sites such as this one. People discussing it on the forums initially assumed it would go on for a few days, it went beyond that. Then it seemed logical that it would conclude at the end of the week, with a punchline on April 1st. When it became clear that the story was of two people building a sandcastle on the beach, the most common prediction was that upon finishing the sandcastle the tide would wash it away and the scene loop to the beginning, forming a metaphor of some sort. Eventually the castle was finished and the tide did wash it away, the scene fading to white... only for a brand new scene to start, two people now on a quest to find out how seas and river and everything else works! It went on for over four months, updating each hour, and finally ended on July 26, 2013.
    Megan: That's what the first part of not ending looks like.

P-T

• Pac Man Fever: The subject of the fall-guy's ire's cellphone is making sounds more appropriate to a machine from the era he's actually referring to.
• Paranoia Gambit: Black Hat Guy hires Rick Astley to show up at a party and...just stand around not breaking into song. His victim quickly snaps and flees the room.
• Parking Payback: "Police reported three dozen cheerful bystanders, yet no one claims to have seen who did it."
• Parodic Table of the Elements: Noting that periodic tables become outdated as new elements are discovered, Randall brings us one from half an hour after the Big Bang, which features only the four elements that existed at the time.^note  No, not earth, air, fire and water.
• The Parody Before Christmas: This comic also did one.
  Twas the night before Christmas at my family's house.
  There were no sounds of stirring save the click of a mouse.
  For 'twas just like a childhood Christmas except
  I'd forgotten the hours that normal folks slept.
• Parody Sue: Gnome Ann. Take every quote with "no man" in them, replace "no man" with "Gnome Ann", and you get what Gnome Ann is like.
  "Time and tide wait for Gnome Ann."
  "The wicked flee when Gnome Ann pursueth."
  "Time ripens all things; Gnome Ann is born wise."
• Parting-Words Regret: Discussed in "Leaving".
• Patchwork Map: In "Geography", Randall states that he wants to live on an example map of geography books.
• Personal Dictionary: In "Communicating", Humpty Dumpty from Through the Looking-Glass explains that whatever word he says means whatever he wants it to mean. Alice throws it back at him by using her own personal dictionary to interpret what he said to mean that she can take all of his stuff, including his car.
• Person with the Clothing: Black Hat Guy.
• Pizza Boy Special Delivery: Subverted.
• Planet of Steves: The Alt Text for Hurricane Names reveals that with the English and Greek alphabets and the Oxford English Dictionary exhausted, and the subsequent storms proving to be uncountably infinite, the NOAA gives up and names all the remaining hurricanes "Steve".
  Your local forecast is "Steve". Good luck.
• Pluto Is Expendable: Refernces several times:
  • In 1551, Pluto's features include a "Debate Hole" where "all the people arguing about Pluto's planet status" will go. The Alt Text proposes an unorthodox solution by reclassifying it as "dwarf Pluto".
  • 1555 tries to make matters even more confusing by assigning the name "Pluto" to an actual planet located in a different solar system.
  • 1020 subverts this trope: the first two panels seem like a typical Pluto controversy, but the third reveal it to be something else entirely.
  • It also has a mention in 473:
    She threw me me out yelling, "You don't say those words. Not in this house." It's been two years. I thought the wounds had healed. But I stand by what I said: Pluto should never have been a planet.
  • While strip #1458 doesn't mention Pluto, it seems to be clearly inspired by its reclassification:
    Luke Skywalker: He's heading for that small moon.
    Obi-Wan Kenobi: That's no moon - it's a space station.
    Luke: It's too big to be a space station.
    Obi-Wan: But it's too small to be a moon.
    [Three hours pass]
    Obi-Wan: Fine! What if we agree it's not a moon, but we make a new category called "dwarf moon"?
    Luke: And what's the cutoff, asshole?! Is this ship a dwarf moon now?
    Obi-Wan: Screw you.
• Poe's Law: Referenced here.
• Poor Communication Kills: Demonstrated here.
• Porn Names: Discussed here.
• Power Perversion Potential: 3D printers.
• Pragmatic Villainy: Hell's representative goes off on a recently deceased executive for dropping what he claims to have been "the perfect laptop".
  Executive: Wait. Don't you encourage evil acts down here?
  Devil: In theory, yes, but we need laptops too!
• Precision F-Strike:
  • Mission. FUCKING. Accomplished!
  • Also: What a goshdarned CUNT
• Premature Aggravation: 439, "Thinking Ahead." "Did he just go crazy and jump out the window?"
• Pre-Mortem One-Liner: Five of them, ranked by the likelihood of catching on.
• The Presents Were Never from Santa: He's an agent for the "forces working beneath the chaos of life"...or maybe not.
• Public Secret Message: This strip makes fun of the public messages in Redwall.
• Pun:
  • Rather blatantly in strips 282, 594, and 626.
  • "I'm sorry if I hurt anthropology-major feelings with Friday's alt-text. I meant it as a friendly jibe at a cool field. I ... anthropologize."
  • This one has two, one as the punchline and one in the Alt Text.
  • 460: Palaeontology.
  • A comic the author drew as a part of a game features Richard Wagner chasing a guy on his "Ring Cycle". He commented: "Why did I draw this?"
  • Complex Conjugate. Oh my Eris...
  • Not just your significant other. Your "statistically significant" other.
  • This strip's Alt Text.
  • 345: You'd make a wonderful dread pirate, Roberts.
  • This. A lampshade is hung in the alt text.
  • He thinks he drew this one to get back at people going through his stuff.
  • They did this one on purpose.
  • The alt text here, accompanied by a Glasses Pull.
  • What are the thoughts of a wind turbine about making people fly by blowing air on them while they're holding up a kite? "I'm not a huge fan."
  • The reason the Immune System Unions got doctors to stop variolation? They don't like scabs.
• Punctuated! For! Emphasis!:
  • FUCK. THAT. SHIT.
  • MISSION. FUCKING. ACCOMPLISHED.
• Punctuation Changes the Meaning: Mentally shifting the hyphen whenever someone refers to something as an "[adjective]-ass [noun]". For example, turning "sweet-ass car" into "sweet ass-car".
• Quip to Black: Here. (The CSI meme version.)
• Quote Mine: Claimed to happen in the Alt Text of World War III+.
• Rage Quit: Vaccine Guidance, when a CDC official on a teleconference is asked all sorts of idiotic questions from the other participants, prompting the official to end the call.
• Rain of Arrows: In the title text of Agincourt Gambit, "↘↘↘" after the chess moves may be interpreted as a rain of arrows. The comic is an analogue of the Battle of Agincourt in The Hundred Years War, where the English, with their longbows, won against the French.
• Readings Are Off the Scale: Discussed in "Spinal Tap Amps", which shows the titular amp that goes up to 11, and three possible responses to it: a normal person would suggest to cap the scale at 10 and make 10 louder; an engineer would argue that "11" is a meaningless number in this context since it lacks any defined units; but a smart engineer would offer to sell an amp that goes up to 12.
• Really Gets Around: In Experimentation, the woman does her lesbian experimentation scientifically, by making a hypothesis and doing experiments, or in this case having sexual encounters on men and women. She apparently has done this to the entire sophomore class, as seen in the title text.
• "The Reason You Suck" Speech: The haired man in Pickup Artist, a pickup artist, tries negging (to imply something that lowers the recipient's self esteem so that they'll want approval) a long-haired woman. The woman negs him back by telling him that he is ultimately a mediocre person, won't find any way to improve and thus be trapped in an never-ending cycle of failure.
  Man: I think I need to go home and think about my life.
  Woman: It won't help.
• Record Needle Scratch:
  • In Baby Names, this is considered as the name of someone's daughter.
  • This comic lampshades the outdatedness of the trope, not by making a Freeze-Frame Introduction, but by introducing history of vinyl discs (or where the scratch would come from).
• Red Pill, Blue Pill: Parodied in this strip. Neo is offered red and blue pills, but instead of choosing between the two, Neo takes both of them, grinds them up, and snorts them. The result is Neo and Morpheus trapped in a weird limbo zone.
• Redundant Parody: In "Dorm Poster", a character sees their roommate having put up a poster of the album cover for Pink Floyd's The Dark Side of the Moon, so they decided to "get back" at them by making a poster that inverts the light dispersion, bunching the rainbow together using a lens and directing it towards an inverted prism to turn it back into white light. The thing is, the concept has already been used◊ for the album's back cover, albeit without the lens.
• Reference Overdosed: Many comics require the reader to know the reference to get the joke.
• Relationship Labeling Problems: In "Couple", Megan and Cueball discuss whether their fling the night before qualifies as a Relationship Upgrade.
  Cueball: Well, will you be my "it's complicated" on Facebook?
• Remix Comic: the forum-produced Making XKCD Slightly Worse. Notable is the fact that the spin-off comic has more than three times the number of strips than the original.
• Retirony: This strip shows an ultimately unsuccessful attempt to defy the trope, with an officer dying the day before his last day on the job, when the department locks retiring officers into a heavily protected room for that day.
• Retro Rocket: The spaceship in this strip looks like a potato with fins.
• Reverse Psychology: Black Hat Guy warns vandals not to mess with his explosive jack-o-lantern with a warning sign.
• Riding the Bomb: In one part of Hoverboard, Beret Guy rides a torpedo. (A regular one, because they have no photon torpedoes.)
• Riding into the Sunset: Subverted in the Alt Text to "Showdown" — after the apparently sentient tumbleweed managed to gun down both cowboys, it tried to roll off into the sunset, but failed because the winds were blowing it in the wrong direction.
• Right Behind Me: This person wants to shoot for the moon, as in with guns, rockets and the like, hoping to destroy that stupid "skycircle". While talking about it, she realizes why her group is acting funny.
• Right Through the Wall: In retaliation for a neighbor who likes having loud sex, someone decides to have one with an elliptical reflector dish.
• Rouge Angles of Satin: "Wrong Superhero", where humans fighting a mantis infestation accidentally summon Etymology Man (who can only give the etymology of whoever they should have summoned) instead of Entomology Man due to confusing the similar-looking words "etymology" (the study of word origins) and "entomology" (the study of insects).
• Rule #1: The first rule of the tautology club is first rule of the tautology club.
• Rule 34:
  • If there are no actual Strunk/White erotic fanfictions out there now, there probably will be as a direct result of this comic.
  • Discussed by name. The man in the comic doubts the validity of the rule until he and the woman agrees that the concept of women playing the electric guitar in the shower would be fairly hot.
• Running Gag:
  • Cory Doctorow blogging in a hot air balloon from the blogosphere.
  • Raptors. Randall might have had a fear of them as he plotted a plan about this.
  • "My Hobby". Apparently, this guy has about a million different hobbies, give or take a few. (Full list)
  • Mailing people bobcats, which started in 325, and was referenced in the title text in two subsequent comics. More recently, during the 2013 holiday season, the XKCD store stated, "I will probably not send you a bobcat" in the main page link.
  • In the "what if" section of the website, the Netherlands is often seen as a superpower, from conquering the world as Munroe explains what happens if the oceans started to drain to having colonized Mars.
  • In this comic (released 24 July 2015), Munroe revels in listing a lot of his old running gags, including the Blogosphere (from the Doctorow comics), the Netherlands, and Sulawesi (which he included in his famous "Map of the Internet" comics).
• Sarcasm Mode: The television show in this comic ends abruptly as a result of being cancelled. The final panel says, "Try an Internet petition drive — those totally work."
• Scary Science Words: The webcomic made a chart of how scary certain technical terms sound compared to how scary the phenomena they describe actually are.
• Scenery Porn:
  • There are several strips that have good visuals in them, such as "United Shapes," but the absolute ginormous size of "Click and drag" takes this trope way past root 121.
  • Then Hoverboard takes it up to infinity. "You've found all the coins" indeed.
• Schmuck Bait: "Jeffrey is famous as the picture on the Wikipedia article on 'Necrosis'." Although that article doesn't have the image anymore, it's still present in articles such as 'Loxoscelism'...
• School Grade Hacking: Final Exam features the exam proctor informing that all their students failed, then describing how their failing marks are stored in a within-reach database and will be submitted the following morning, as if Tempting Fate for them to change it themselves. Since the subtitle says this is for a cybersecurity course, the trope is Played With for the implication that hacking the database to alter grades isn't cheating, but the intended solution.
• Science Is Wrong: In Tesla Coil, when a tesla coil is shown to Black Hat man, he manages to shoot electricty from his fingers. The only explanation from him is that science doesn't work.
• Scrabble Babble: In a comic observing Randall's wife surviving cancer for two years, she would beat him in Scrabble by using words like "Zarg", while using the cancer to guilt him into letting her win. The Alt Text suggests that once the cancer drugs kick in, she becomes easy to beat.
• The Scream: The beret man has endless wings (not chicken wings). Everyone around him screams as he grows them to the size Earth.
• Selfcest: In Choices: Part 4, the woman inside the bubble and her clone outside have a conversation about the reality that they're in. The clone, in the end, admits that she made out with her.
• Self-Deprecation:
  • Physicists is about physics students (annoyingly) stating that a problem is actually easy to solve provided that they have a simplified model. Randall has a degree in physics, which might have inspired him to make this comic.
  • The hipster graph notes that the graph itself is "making it all worse."

• Serial Escalation: There are poster sized comics. There's one or two wall sized comics. But #1110 is so big it probably wouldn't fit on the floor of a passenger jet hangar. It's 165888 pixels wide by 79872 pixels high (roughly 46'/12m wide by 22'/6m tall at 300DPI). The stick figures are about half an inch tall in a world that is to them 5 miles across. Trying to find everything in it is likely to take at least half an hour.
• Sesquipedalian Loquaciousness: Wikipedia's propensity for this is discussed in the strip "Malamanteau."
• Sexy Shirt Switch: At the bottom of #819, that girl in biology class wearing one of your shirts rates 4 (out of 4) stars on the hotness meter. That girl in biology class wearing one of your mother's shirts rates a Flat "What".
• Sham Wedding: #1100 comic has a fake wedding (and, it's implied, a years-long Fake Relationship) as a misdirection play in a high school football game.
• Shaped Like Itself:
  • #688, as a set of chart, contains itself.
  • #703 shows the Tautology Club, which is about tautologisms (e.g. honorable people are in honor societies and people in honor societies are honourable).
  • According to #1079, Colorado is shaped like its (fake) Wikipedia article.
  • The graph in #1230 is true if you interpret it either as a polar or a cartesian plot: as a polar plot, the certainty (radius) increases over time (angle); as a cartesian plot, the certainty (y-axis) decreases over time (x-axis).
• Shout-Out:
  • Many, but of particular note is this one. It gets worse. Click the comic itself.
  • Earlier than that, we have "In Popular Culture". It's very subtle, but take a look at the works listed as examples. Any of them look familiar? This also parodies People Sit on Chairs, showing The Other Wiki featuring various works containing wood with no narrative purpose.
  • Calvin and Hobbes say Hi. And again (this one also contains Shout Outs to Rocky and Bullwinkle and The Lord of the Rings).
  • In the first "1337" comic, one character poses the question, "How does she type with oven mitts on?" This is a reference to a frequently asked question on Homestar Runner's Strong Bad emails, and possibly also a reference to his "training gloves" in the site's "In Search of the Yello Dello" toon.
  • The final "1337" comic has the line "You'd make a great dread pirate, Roberts."
  • Several comics reference Ender's Game.
  • The Alt Text on this one is a reference to an obscure detail in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader.
  • House of Pancakes is House of Leaves meets International House of Pancakes.
  • Strip 574 "Swine Flu":
    • Hannelore's twitter account is one of the tweeters.
    • It also has someone asking how long it'll take the flu to reach Madagascar.
  • "Craigslist Apartments" has a few notable addresses, including one house on scenic Ash Tree Lane.
  • Strip Games. See the Alt Text? Right.
  • Black Hat is based on Aram from Men in Hats in many ways.
  • Douglas Hofstadter and his recursiveness.
  • Jason Fox makes a cameo appearance in this strip.
  • The Alt Text of this strip is "We have met the enemy and he is us".
  • Gravity Wells has a couple of things in Titan going "weeoooeeooo".
  • Click and Drag:
    • The falling whale is a reference to The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.
    • A Creeper can be found in one of the caves, chasing someone with a pickaxe.
    • A part of the scenery is the classic world 1-1 of Super Mario Bros..
    • Two X-wings can be spotted, one taking off from a cave and one in the sky.
    • In one spot of the map, a woman can be seen ignoring her friend's warning and going into the tall grass, saying "Pikachu, I choose death -- and with it, immortality."
  • Hey! you're doing science. And you're still alive
  • Big Brother realizes he's trapped in the worst possible hell...
  • One of the contenders for the awful ringtone championship was "That noise from Dumb and Dumber."
  • The Alt Text for this strip references the Helvetica Scenario.
  • While the entirety of Wait Wait is a reference to the news quiz Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me! if you look closely, one of the articles also quotes Peter Sagal as saying "I aten't dead."
  • This strip has some suspiciously familiar file extensions strung together in the bottom line.
  • In the "Jurassic World" strip, apart from the obvious reference to Jurassic World, the punchline is that the reconstructed dinosaur is T-Rex from Dinosaur Comics (and as a bonus, he's depicted in the same pose he always stands in when delivering a punchline).
  • To The Lion King (1994) here.
  • Hoverboard is loaded with Star Wars references (probably because of the upcoming release of The Force Awakens). There's also more well-hidden references to Star Trek, The Ring, Steven Universe, Hamlet, Percy Shelley's "Ozymandias", Prince of Persia, and more. It's Click and Drag all over again...
  • Centrifugal Force mixes the most famous scene in Goldfinger with a classic physics debate.
  • This one is a very dark shoutout to Car Talk.
  • In #1665, a guy suggests a new image for a Wikipedia city page. Another guy points out that the proposed image is a screenshot of Zootopia.
  • The "British Map labeled by an American" has lots of these, including "Everdeen" and "FHQWGADS"
  • This one references The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe.
  • The VKCouplesTesting site is a reference to the Voight-Kampff Test.
  • The Title Text for "Aspect Ratio" mentions Randall mistaking "Anamorphic widescreen" for a widescreen Animorphs movie.
  • The Title Text in "Old Files" mentions him finding a file named ANIMORPHS-NOVEL.RTF (presumably a fanfic), and quietly deleting it in shame.
  • "Manual for Civilization" is about a collection of books to rebuild civilization. It's nothing but Animorphs books.
  • "Incognito Mode" has a woman (possibly Rachel, since she has blonde hair) warning Cueball to never stay in incognito mode longer than 2 hours. The title text mentions morphing into apples to infiltrate Apple (the company).
  • The title text for "Ears" hypothesizes that people whose earbuds don't fall out must have a Yeerk in their head holding the earbuds for them.
  • What If? 2 Gift Guide shouts out Hemingway's Six-Word Story in its title text, suggesting the gift of baby shoes for people who like babies or literature, but not both, as reference to the story's loose implication that the shoes are only being given because a baby died.
• Showdown at High Noon: Parodied in "Showdown." A showdown occurs between two cowboys at noon, a tumbleweed rolls by... then the tumbleweed pulls out dual revolvers and guns both the cowboys down.
• Sickeningly Sweethearts: Black Hat Guy and his equally sociopathic girlfriend, when they think no one's watching. God help you if you catch them at it.
• Sidetracked by the Analogy:
  • In "Dark Matter", Megan tells Cueball that dark matter density is about 0.3_EV/_cm3. To illustrate the ratio, she says that for an amount of mass equal to the Earth, there would be a squirrel's worth of dark matter. Cueball interprets this literally and takes it as meaning that one squirrel is made of dark matter, then further misinterprets that all squirrels are made of dark matter.
  • Another dark matter metaphor (what we can see is just the tip of the iceberg; most of the universe's mass is unobservable to us) taken literally (if the ice below water level is dark matter, how did it interact with the baryonic matter of the Titanic?)
• Significant Anagram: The alt-text of this strip points out that ARCTANGENT THETA = ENCHANT AT TARGET.
• Silent Scenery Panel: The occasional landscape drawings.
• Silly Will: "Dying Gift" is about a dying man who pranks his loved ones by bequeathing them ridiculous things that will be as difficult as possible to put into storage.
  Alt Text: And to you, I leave my life-sized ice sculpture replica of the Pietà which was blessed by the Pope. You must never let it melt! Now, remember, all gifts must be removed from my estate within 24 hours.
• Skewed Priorities:
  • As the Apocalypse unfolds around him and the dead rise from their graves, Cueball's first priority is to get him and his math department colleagues the Erdős number of 1, from the now-reanimated Paul Erdős.
  • In Devotion to Duty, terrorists hold up a building, tie up hostages, and cut the communication lines. The resident sysadmin kills everyone in his path, climbs through ventillation ducts, and walks across broken glass... to reconnect the communication lines, ignoring the hostages.
  • Path Minimization presents the Lifeguard problem: a lifeguard has to reach someone drowning in a body of water and has to figure out the fastest way to get there. In addition to the three normal paths that each intend to minimize time, depending on how fast swimming is compared to running,^ie  beelining the drowning person (fastest if the lifeguard swims as fast as they run), running to the closest point on the shore to them and then swimming (fastest if swimming is significantly slower than running), or somewhere in between, the comic presents two additional options. One path maximizes time rather than minimizes it, going off the image's border, presumably travelling around the world, and then reconvening from the opposite side of the body of water. The other path moves away from the shore, gets the lifeguard a scoop of ice cream, and then beelines them to the drowning person. The Alt Text states that getting ice cream for a currently-drowning person is a social obligation for lifeguards.
• Slaying Mantis: Don't forget to call the right superhero.
• Slow-Loading Internet Image: Discussed in this comic.
• Smart People Play Chess: On roller coasters, no less.
• Snowy Screen of Death: With a screensaver. And a weather forecast.
• Something Only They Would Say: How to get access to a server.
• Something Person: Etymology-man!
• Sophisticated as Hell:
  • Strip 36
  • And this one.
  • This happens a lot. Check this strip.
• Soul-Crushing Desk Job: The strip "Academia vs. Business" contrasts academia and business with their reaction to solving a seemingly impossible programming problem; the professor is amazed and sees this as a revolution in queuing theory, the boss just gives the programmer another issue that is insultingly easy in comparison.
• Space Elevator: After countless engineers / spend trillions over fifty years, / a modern Babel disappears / because some fuck brought pruning shears.
• Spaceship Slingshot Stunt: "Six Words" has one planned.
• Space Travel Veto: The work often throws shade at this trope and its real-life adherents.
  • In "Realistic Criteria", quoted above, White Hat argues that we need to solve all our problems on Earth before we can afford to go to space. Cueball sarcastically asks how long it will take to "solve all problems", the implication being that it will never happen even if we don't got to space.
  • The Alt Text for "65 Years" points out the inevitable outcome of such a sentiment: human extinction.
    The universe is probably littered with the one-planet graves of cultures which made the sensible economic decision that there's no good reason to go into space—each discovered, studied, and remembered by the ones who made the irrational decision.
• Space Whale Aesop: This is what happens when you use GOTO.
• Speak of the Devil:
  • This strip features an abuse of Bloody Mary. Explaining it would ruin the joke.
  • And another, but for the more serious purpose of co-authoring a paper with Bloody Mary.
  • This strip references the old superstition that this was true of bears, which is why the original English word for it was abandoned in favor of the present one. When Gretchen McCulloch is asked about this, she hazards a guess as to what the original word was... and is promptly proven right. Cue Oh, Crap! moment...^*  Funnily enough, the word she guesses is actually the word for bear... in Welsh.
• Special Edition Title: On October 26, 2009, the site was temporarily redesigned in a retraux early 90's style in dubious honor of the end of GeoCities. Complete with broken HTML!◊
• Spin the Earth Backwards: Sort of.
• Spy Speak: Parodied.
• Staircase Tumble: Black Hat rides to the top of the country's longest escalator and blocks the end with a chin-up bar, causing the people to tumble down like dominoes while the escalator still takes them up.
• Stalker with a Crush / Dogged Nice Guy: Once again, Strip 513. You'll understand.
• Starfish Alien: Whatever the entity in Steroids is.
• The Stars Are Going Out: Invoked in this strip.
  The point is that there are too many stars. It's been freaking me out.
• Start My Own:
  • In Standards, two of the characters create a single unifying standard for the fourteen other (competing) standards. Instead of helping anything, there are now just 15 competing standards.
  • In Honor Societies, Cueball creates tautology club when he finds out it doesn't already exist.
• Stating the Simple Solution: "I'm An Idiot," which includes an Alt Text claiming it's Based on a True Story.
  "I'm locked out, and trying to get my roommate to let me in. First I tried her cell phone, but it's off. Then I tried IRC, but she's not online. I couldn't find anything to throw at her window, so I SSH'd into the Mac Mini in the living room and got the speech synth to yell to her for me. But I think I left the volume way down, so I'm reading the OS X docs to learn to set the volume via command line."
  "Ah. I take it the doorbell doesn't work?"
  Silence
• Stealth Pun:
  • Ahem.
  • This strip.
  • In this strip, where an audience member lampshades its use.
  • In this strip, beneath Black Hat Guy's tool bench is a box labelled "drills" and a box labelled "non-drills".
  • In this strip: "Haiku? It's an experimental OS that I... oh, never mind." Now try counting the syllables.
  • The Alt Text in this strip asks, "When you talk about the job experience you'll give me, why do you pronounce Job with a long 'o'?" This is a reference to the Biblical figure Job, whose story centers on him being tormented with sickness while maintaining his faith in God.
• Steven Ulysses Perhero: Lampooned here with athlete's names; Randall mentions three real names (Margaret Court, a tennis player; Gary Player, a golf player; and Lonzo Ball, a basketball player), and then mentions a few other names like Jake Halfpipe, Dwight Shuttlecock and Kate Dopingscandal. The Alt Text mentions how Usain Bolt will be superseded in popularity by Derek Legs in the 2090s.
• Stick-Figure Comic
• Stock Unsolved Mysteries: In this strip, Cueball theorises that D.B. Cooper is actually Tommy Wiseau. However, 1098 strips later, this was proven false.
• "Stop Having Fun" Guys: Trope Namer. This strip shows a guy deriding a few people playing Rock Band, telling them it doesn't make them cool ... even though they're having fun. invoked
• String Theory:
  • An oddly recursive version.
  • This strip briefly references the trope at the end of the Alt Text.
• Stupid Question Bait: A press conference about an asteroid heading towards Earth gets sidetracked by reporters asking about what role Social Media has played.
• Success Through Insanity: Don Quixote to the rescue!
• Super Zeroes: Etymology-Man, seen in these strips, whose superpower is to explain the etymology of various words and nothing else.
  • This strip is about a version of Superman where the adjective "super" is intended to be just as impressive as it is in the astronomical term "supermoon", meaning not very.
• Suspiciously Specific Denial: In the Jet Lag strip, the character is having trouble staying awake because of jet lag. That's what it is. He definitely didn't spend half the night reading Wikipedia.
• Swallowed a Fly: This strip, referencing a similar example in Serenity.
• Swivel-Chair Antics: Graphed.
• Take That!:
  • As required for any "real" computer user, the strip hates Windows, especially Vista.
  • Computational linguists are also targeted occasionally. Because fuck computational linguistics. In the Alt Text:
    Chomskyists, generative linguists, and Ryan North, your days are numbered.
  • While all those are often partially tongue in cheek, DRM gets searing loads of venom.
  • Randall also makes his views on string theory fairly clear. Brains vs string theorists is a very Old Pun.
  • Fuck grapefruit. Fuck coconuts.
  • This for people who endlessly parrot Python.
  • Fuck literary criticism, philosophy, anthropology,psychology... Basically, any field that isn't physics, mathematics, or computer science.
  • He has also declared war on chemists, though that's more a grudging rivalry than a belittlement.
  • With some exceptions, like the one against homeopathy, the Take Thats are usually intended to be in jest. Occasionally the comic doesn't make this entirely clear; notably, the one against anthropology majors was so widely seen as a serious insult to the field that the author later issued an apology for it, as noted above under Incredibly Lame Pun.
  • Fuck the cosine
  • "Console Lines." Xbox / Playstation fanboys are jerks. Nintendo fans will give you a hug, though.
  • "Fuck Cancer."
  • "Suckville is considered by the Census Bureau to be part of the Detroit Metropolitan statistical area, despite not being located anywhere near Detroit."
  • There's one against Atlas Shrugged here.
  • Another Alt Text one: "I've been trying for a couple of years now, but I haven't been able to come up with a name dumber than 'Renesmee'."
  • "Slideshow" attacks websites featuring slideshows utilizing the Ken Burns effect.
  • A truly well-deserved one towards Youtube comments sections.
  • One towards internet misogynists.
  • "Error Types" defines a Type IX error as "The Rise of Skywalker".
  • "Moon Landing" delivers a simultaneous jab at Moon-Landing Hoax believers and, perhaps surprisingly, NASA themselves — "If NASA were willing to fake great accomplishments, they'd have a second one by now."
  • The aliens in "Alien Visitors 2" arrive recommending technologies to humanity that are outdated and inefficient or dangerous, such as biplanes, hydrogen blimps, and at the end, the Juicero juicer press.
  • "Humans" and "Feathered Dinosaur Venn Diagram" both take a jab at the people who refuse to accept modern theories about dinosaurs.
• Talk About the Weather: Weather geeks HATE this trope.
• Talking Your Way Out: Inverted. The superintelligent AI is so convincing, it convinces the Black Hat Guy to let him back into the box.
• Telepathic Sprinklers: "Pool on the roof must've sprung a leak."
• Tempting Fate:
  • A couple times in this strip.
    "Are the raptors contained?" "Sure. Unless they figure out how to build lightsabers."
  • #2730: Code Lifespan has Ponytail do this to code that's well-made and poorly made:
    "It took some extra work to build, but now we'll be able to use it for all our future projects." [Subtitle text:How to ensure your code is never reused]
    "Let's not overthink it; if this code is still in use THAT far in the future, we'll have bigger problems." [Subtitle text:How to ensure your code lives forever]
• Terrible Ticking: The comic The Tell-Tale Beat parodies The Tell-Tale Heart, in which the murder victim hidden beneath the floorboards is Daft Punk, and Cueball is driven to insanity by the constant background noise of their synth beats.
• Terminator Twosome: Exaggerated in this strip. Someone is visited by their future self, warning them to not watch Terminator: Dark Fate. Then, their other future self appears, this time from a timeline where they regret not watching the movie, convincing the present self to go see it with them. And then the future selves are visited by their future selves, wanting to stop them both. The comic eventually devolves as more and more future selves arrive, including one who wants to kill Hitler but got the year wrong.
• That Cloud Looks Like...: Cueball asks Megan what she sees in a cloud, but she instead points her cell phone at it and uses Google's image search to identify it. Google says it's a cloud, Cueball is unimpressed.
• The Last of These Is Not Like the Others: Cueball and friends try to come up with a word to fill the Kix slogan "Kid Tested, Mother...". Their failed attempts include "Selected", "Perfected", "Not Notified", "Watching Helplessly", "Infected", "Consumed", and "Fucker".
• There Are No Girls on the Internet: This strip addresses the author's theories about the reason for that.
• They Changed It, Now It Sucks!: In Workflow, after the spacebar was fixed to no longer overheat the CPU, someone, who wanted their computer to interpret a rise in temperature as a control key, claims to have their workflow broken.
• Thinking the Same Thought: "Sheeple" has several people each imagining that they're the only person capable of thought.
• This Is for Emphasis, Bitch!: Science. It works, bitches.
• Threatening Shark: Just imagine what would ensue if this comic ever reached the folks behind Sharknado.
• Three Laws-Compliant: This strip shows what happens when the order of those three laws is messed with.
• Title Drop: Alt Text drop, actually. From "Time": "We need to run."
• To Be Lawful or Good: He chooses lawful.
• Too Dumb to Live: In this comic, a girl runs up to a man named Rob and tells him:
  "Remember last week when we dug up all those Indian bones and made puppets out of them? It turns out they were buried over an ancient Indian burial ground!"
• The Topic of Cancer: Shows up in more than a few strips, as Randall Monroe's now-wife had been diagnosed with stage-3 breast cancer during their engagement.
• Touché: When Black Hat goes to confront Danish, she blows up the mines she planted under his car. Black Hat had already found the mines and put them in her garage. Her response: "Touché".
• Tower of Babel: Played with in this strip, also titled "Tower of Babel". God is actually impressed by the tower, and decides to reward humanity with an abundance of one specific thing they want. Unfortunately, one of the people to reach the top is a linguist.
• Tradesnark™:
  • In this comic's alt text after the spambot is found out:
    "Fine, walk away. I'm gonna go cry into a pint of Ben&Jerry's Brownie Batter(tm) ice cream [link], then take out my frustration on a variety of great flash games from PopCap Games(r) [link]." [sic]
  • This comic's Alt Text, about the downside of reading "according to a PDF" in the news.
    "Adobe people may periodically email your newsroom to ask you to call it an 'Adobe® PDF document,' but they'll reverse course once they learn how sarcastically you can pronounce the registered trademark symbol."
• Triple Shifter: In this strip, one of the characters proposes a sleep schedule that allocates 28 hour days, as the other person has a flexible work schedule. The Alt Text notes that actually attempting this will cause the individual to go insane.
• Tripod Terror: When wind turbines become this, it's up to Don Quixote to save the day.
• Truth in Television: The "Get out of my head Randall!" meme where many of the comics are applicable to the everyday lives of the readers.
• Turing Test: The examiner is now questioning his own humanity. Doubles as an Alternative Turing Test.
• TV Tropes Will Ruin Your Life: Seen here, where a guy finds themself on TV Tropes and ended up being unable to stop browsing the site. Possibly the first actual work to use this?
• Twice Shy:
  • This strip. And again.
  • Deconstructed (sort of) and subverted.
• Two-Keyed Lock: Parodied in Strip #2677, making an analogy about the cyclical nature of software security. A two-key system is implemented, a device to facilitate the use of that system is developed, and the same system is used on that device.

U-Z

• Unholy Matrimony: Black Hat Guy acquires a girlfriend in a mini-arc who shares similar interests and is more than a match for him. She comes up again, but slightly more rarely than he does.
• Un-Installment: 404
• The Unpronounceable: U+202e.
• Unsound Effect:
  • Draw. Make make. Scoop. Pour. Tie. Rumble. Boom. Crack. Fuse. Follow. Detach. Open. Remove. Admire. Examine. Grind. Set. Approve. Give.
  • "Touch."
  • "Park."
• Unusually Uninteresting Sight: "It's like, you know the giant spider downtown that sits on the buildings and sometimes eats cars?"..."I've been meaning to ask, what's with that spider?"
• Unwinnable Joke Game: There's a strip about Tetris. Predictably, someone on the internet made a game like that. And some managed to score lines in it.
• Vanity License Plate:
  • The tendency of such plates to be owned by pretentious rich jerks is parodied, and Black Hat Guy claims another victim.
  • One guy tries to fool people by getting a vanity plate consisting of 1's and I's, thinking he can commit crimes with impunity as no one will be able to correctly record his plate number. This backfires on him in that he's the only one with a license plate like this, so the cops can find him easily; and the Alt Text suggests his girlfriend gets a similar plate so that she can commit crimes that he'll get blamed for.
• Viewer Pronunciation Confusion: In-Universe example in "Punctuation", in which each letter in the word "Tuesday" is explained as being pronounced the same as in another word... which can, in each case, have two different pronunciations, depending on meaning.
  Pet peeve: ambiguous pronunciation guides.
• Viewers Are Geniuses: One of the biggest practitioners. The strip often bases comics on obscure math, physics, or computer jokes. This has gotten less common over time, though the forums and ExplainXKCD remain very useful. You may need to be knowledgeable in several possibly obscure or complicated fields to completely get some of the earlier ones.
  • This strip has a number of programmers one-upping each other over their choice of text editors, until the last guy boasts that he uses a single butterfly to flap its wings, creating air currents to cause pockets of higher air pressure that direct cosmic rays to flip bits on a hard drive. So, in one strip: computer programming, tao philosophy, meteorology, particle physics, and computer hardware.
  • The What If? 2 Gift Guide suggests a number of gifts for friends in various science fields. Some of the jokes behind them are obvious enough to a layman, such as the gift for people with an interest in "animals" — who in their right mind would give a gift-wrapped bobcat as an actual present? — but others, not so much. The gift suggested for people with an interest in "puzzles" ("two goats and a new car") is a reference to the Monty Hall Problem, for example.
  • Another example: Circuit Diagram is a really bizarre circuit diagram that includes things like holy water, a tangled mess of resistors, and a gladitorial arena where two wires go in and only one comes out. To an electrician the strip might be a funny kind of nonsense; to anyone who doesn't know how to read circuit diagrams, it's just a normal kind of nonsense.
• Visible Silence: E.g. The end of this strip.
• Visual Pun: This comic features a literal tarbomb.
• Voodoo Shark: Amelia Earhart explains that it took her 74 years to complete her flight around the world because the world is big. She doesn't seem to comprehend why this raises more questions.
• Walking Techbane: In this strip, a guy encounters a computer bug that somehow transfers from computer to computer via his keyboard. His friend mentions that when a robot apocalypse occurs, she plans to hide in his house because "any Skynet drones that come near will develop inexplicable firmware problems and crash".
• We Are as Mayflies: To the time vultures, at any rate.
• Weasel Words: Randall has a bone to pick with Newscasters who use "one of the [X]" instead of "the [X]" when they aren't 100% certain to the validity of a claim, they get so used to hedging their speech that they use it in cases where they can be 100% certain, and the weasel words just ruin what they are saying.
• Weird Currency: In this strip, a news report announces the collapse of the dollar, and that the new currency will be the number of funny pictures saved to your computer.
• Wham Episode: Randall reveals that due to illness in the family, the next few weeks are going to be filler. Normal updates resume. Then five months later, he gives us a Tear Jerker with a heart-breaking Ironic Echo. (His now-wife is doing just fine, though.)
  • From "Time": "The ocean is coming."◊
• Wham Line: "Never".
  "I know that no matter where I go or who I build a life with, I will never have with anyone what I had with you. Thank God."
• What Is This Thing You Call "Love"?: My normal approach is useless here.
• What Kind of Lame Power Is Heart, Anyway?: "Wrong Superhero", where all Etymology-Man could do was to explain the etymology of the name of the superhero the people fighting the giant mantises should have summoned instead.
• What Measure Is a Mook?: Done via FPS mod.
• When All You Have Is a Hammer…: Parodied.
• White and Red and Eerie All Over: Invoked and Played for Laughs in this strip, which claims that Christmas presents are parasitic plants to Christmas trees. One piece of evidence listed is that the "bright white and red colors indicate a lack of chlorophyll."
• Who Names Their Kid "Dude"?: In "Exploits of a Mom", a woman is called out for not only giving her son a ridiculous name but also for deleting the school's student records with SQL injection.
  Did you really name your son Robert'); DROP TABLE Students;-- ?
• Why Don't You Just Shoot Him?: This comic points this out, specifically with regards to zombie movies that start in labs.
• Why We Can't Have Nice Things: You could argue that it's subverted in the Alt-text... but not by much.
• Wiki Vandal: Wikipedia articles are frequently defaced whenever a relevant topic is mentioned, as this blog documents.
• Wiki Walk:
  • This shows the danger of falling into these.
  • This comic describes the trope perfectly.
  • This one mentions a path in the Alt Text.
• Winged Soul Flies Off at Death: Merging this trope with Painting the Medium and Rule of Symbolism. Pareidolia at its best. R.I.P. John Horton Conway, who invented Game Of Life.
• Wishing for More Wishes: In this strip, the "Wish Bureau" keeps an ongoing log of Black Hat's clever attempts to get extra wishes, including wishing for "a universe which is an exact replica of this one sans rules against meta-wishes."
• Women Are Wiser: The women usually play the more sensible part in the comic.
• Word Purée Title: Explained here.
• Word-Salad Humor: Done in "Laser Products."
• The World Is Just Awesome: In general, the frequent invocations of interesting bits of science. In particular, xkcd Loves the Discovery Channel and Click and Drag make the point that it's a big world full of fun and wonder.
• World War Whatever: "World War III+" makes fun of Einstein's (or whoever's) famous quote. It continues past World War IV though XIV, and tells us the exact kind of weapons used in those wars.
• Would Rather Suffer: The Alt Text of "Gen Z" quotes someone expressing a preference for an early death over a lifetime of eating yogurt.
  Curdled milk, of a peculiar kind, made after a Bulgarian recipe and called "yaghurt," is now a Parisian fad and is believed to be a remedy against growing old. A correspondent who has tried it, says he would prefer to die young. (1905, The Elk Falls Journal)
• X Called; They Want Their Y Back:
  • Interrupted here due to Sarcasm Blindness (or maybe the guy's just snarking back).
  • Parodied here, where they didn't leave a message on voicemail. To leave a message, press '1'. (Rather hard to do on a rotary phone.)
  • Umwelt has two variants that also parody the trope, one for using Maxthon Cloud Browser and another for using Netscape Navigator.
    Maxthon: Maxthon? Hey, 2005 called. Didn't say anything. All I could hear was sobbing.
    Netscape: Netscape Navigator? Hey, the nineties called - drunk, as usual. I hung up without saying anything.
• X Days Since: 38 days since someone reset this sign.
• Xtreme Kool Letterz:
  • Illustrated in Car Model Names. Note that X and Z are the top two.
  • Life Goals collects a whole list of these. The Alt Text lampshades the comic title using this trope.
• Ye Olde Butcherede Englishe:
  • Voynich Manuscript produces such a conversation from 500 years ago.
  • Period Speech combine this with modern slang (and other anachronisms) to make fun of period pieces.
• Yet Another Christmas Carol: #2836 is a parody of the classic A Christmas Carol: three ghosts of past, present, and future haunt Cueball to teach him the true meaning of the holiday. But the holiday they are here to teach is All Hallows' Eve, not Christmas. As such, their lesson on the "true meaning of Halloween" is just them floating around his bedside and making various spooky ghost noises.
• You Answered Your Own Question: Happens here.
• Your Brain Won't Be Much of a Meal: When Zombie Feynman wants brains after explaining how MythBusters are true science:
  Person: Try the physics lab next door.
  Zombie Feynman: I said BRAINS. All they've got are string theorists.
• Your Mom:
  • Played with frequently. The trope is also used. Subverted here. Is in the Alt Text here and here.
  • Mrs. Roberts defaces websites of people who tell these jokes to her daughter.
  • Another one, and still another.
  • She apparently has a deeper gravity well than Saturn.
  • Included in the pile of Hiroshima as a Unit of Measure comparisons. She weighs 200 kgs, (220 with cheap jewelery and 223 with cheap jewelery and makeup)

• Zerg Rush: Due to the popularity of xkcd, it's common to click on links and watch counts skyrocket. This is more apparent on "What if?", which has at least one outside link and a couple of PDFs per post. One of the most common comments in any of them is "xkcd army reporting in!"
• Zonk: The beret guy appears on a nameless game show based on the classic two-goats-and-a-car problem and wins a goat. Instead of going for the car, he takes the goat and says he has an overgrown yard.

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