Where Did The Name Of Doctor Who's Iconic Sci-Fi Villains, The Daleks, Come From?

"Doctor Who" existed before Star Trek tried to redefine science fiction and spanned across TV, comics, books, and audio adventures. It featured one of the most terrifying villains ever conjured up: the Daleks. Created by "Doctor Who" screenwriter, Terry Nation, the Daleks are the Doctor's most recognizable and feared enemies that act as an almost hive-minded, totalitarian species, wanting nothing but to eradicate anything not Dalek.

This antagonist first appeared in 1963's adventure, "The Daleks", a First Doctor serial (William Hartnell), in which the TARDIS crew land on the Daleks' home planet, Skaro, and must survive against the despotic pepperpots. Nation, whose estate still holds a majority of the rights to the Daleks, originally said that he'd come up with the name when looking at encyclopedias, reading and collecting "DAL" to "LEK". However, in a Radio Times interview (link will download a PDF to your device) from the '70s, he's quoted as saying that this story was due to being "desperate" to come up with a "profound explanation" for "persistent journalists."

In reality, Nation found that the name "Dalek" came naturally. He states it "simply rolled off the typewriter." Nation would contribute a majority of the Dalek scripts until 1979, when he stopped writing for "Doctor Who." Aside from creating the Daleks, Nation also had a hand in creating Davros, the in-universe creator of the Daleks, featured in one of "Doctor Who's" all-time greatest stories, "Genesis of the Daleks."

As with most sci-fi shows, the real-life backstory of the creation of a character is never that exciting. So, in the show, where do the Daleks get their name from? As explained in Nation's "Genesis of the Daleks," a brutal, almost genocidal war has broken out on Skaro, with the Doctor sent back by his people, the Time Lords, to prevent the creation of the Daleks. The episode introduces two factions, the Kaleds and the Thals, with Davros mutating the Kaleds in secret experiments and introducing new "travel machines."

Partway into the second episode of the serial, Davros announces that the new travel machines will be called "Daleks," an anagram of "Kaleds." This idea is possibly planted by the Doctor himself in a bit of time travel shenanigans. When David Tennant was recast as the 14th Doctor (originally playing the 10th), he starred in a small short for British charity fundraiser, Children in Need.

Crashing into a Kaled ship, the 14th Doctor accidentally breaks the more dangerous-looking prototype Dalek, with one of Davros' assistants panicking. As the Doctor tries to comedically make amends, even offering a plunger and asking if it was the "Genesis of the Daleks," he gives the assistant the idea to pitch "Dalek" to a younger Davros. We can only assume that Davros spent years holding onto the name, with the Doctor once again furthering the development of the Daleks.