Are the Daleks from Doctor Who Czech?

“Exterminate… Exterminate!”

“In a desperate attempt to satisfy persistent journalists, who wanted some profound explanation for my naming the Daleks, I told them that I’d been inspired by the letters on a volume of an encyclopaedia. But… no encyclopaedia in print covers those letters DAL-LEK. Anyone checking the facts could have found me out… The name, it simply rolled off the typewriter.”

But the notion that Nation simply made up the name out of thin air isn’t very satisfying, either. And since the writer passed away in 1998, we may never have conclusive evidence about where the name came from.

But that shouldn’t stop us from theorizing.

The term ‘dalek’ is used in Slavic languages like Russian, Serbo-Croatian, Polish. And Czech, where the word ‘daleko’ is a common term for “far away”.

It’s not a stretch to imagine that Nation would have borrowed a Slavic term meaning “far away” as a name for his alien beings from the far future.

But why specifically Czech?

Nation would have known that the term ‘robot’ originated as the Czech word ‘robota’, meaning ‘serf labor,’ and was popularized by writer Karel Čapek in the 1920 play R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots).

While the Daleks aren’t technically robots – they’re aliens living inside a metallic casing – they do have the appearance of a traditional robotic being.

It’s within the realm of possibility, then, that Nation was inspired by the Czech term ‘robot’, and sought another within the language to use as the name for his robot-like beings, eventually settling on the appropriate far-away meaning ‘dalek’ (like Čapek sliced off the ‘a’ in robota, Nation would have cut the ‘o’ from daleko.)