Etymology

today's lucky 10,000

Today it means: A theoretical set of 10,000 people who learn something considered "common knowledge" for the first time. Full definition →

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The story

Coined by American cartoonist, author and engineer Randall Munroe in 2012 in his webcomic xkcd, based on a calculation that given four million yearly births in the United States, about ten thousand people learn something that "everyone knows" every day.

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.