And not forgetting the SIDRAT of course...

Which was backronymed in the novelization of War Games.

That is brilliant, never thought of it like that.

As a reason / excuse for this "error" I like it.

Not just the novelization, it was called a SIDRAT on the show too!

It's possible that the Doctor or Susan was actually part of the design team on Gallifrey who invented the TARDIS. Not necessarily the first time capsule but the first dimensionally transcendental one. Perhaps the Doctor let Susan come up with the name for it.

Many decades later he decided to steal one for himself (just because Susan looked like a teenager doesn't mean she was one )

This has been a fun continuity question throughout most of my viewing of Doctor Who. For one:

Why does The Master call his time machine "my Tardis" if it was just a name Susan gave to her grandfather's particular time machine?

I seem to remember that in classic Who, pretty much all the Time Lords used the word TARDIS. And not just about the Doctor's, but any of them. So if Susan did come up with the word, then she must have coined it while still living on Gallifrey and then been proud as punch as everyone else started using the word too. Either that or she was fibbing a bit to make herself look clever.

I think the TARDIS translation matrix is simply taking care of it for us viewers. Though the Time Lords do at several points refer to it as a Capsule or a TT Capsule rather than a TARDIS.

If we're looking for continuity errors in Name, I personally think that the universe changing when the GI threw himself into the Doctor's timestream threw up all sorts of issues because the fact that we've already met several other Claras means that the GI and Clara have already thrown themselves into the timestream and Clara has already reversed everything the GI tried to do and so it makes no sense for the actual event to have any repercussions on the universe at all.

I came up with my own theory to explain this (and the fact that the Doctor doesn't remember any other Claras from his past) with the notion of a changing loop where the first time Clara threw herself in she only turned up in Snowmen and Asylum (and possibly the Bells of St. John) and this is now the second time when the GI does more far reaching damage and second time round Clara has to go back further to fix it. However, the trouble with home made theories like that is that the events of subsequent episodes may disprove them which will leave us back with the continuity error again!

Either Susan was not telling the truth when she said she named the type 40 time capsule as a Tardis or...

Susan is the one who created/helped create Tardis's in the first place and named them/created the nickname Tardis in the same way as we dont call cars "automobiles" or "personel conveying machines"

Or the writers had no idea how big the show was going to be or how long it would last and had originally thought that there would only be one Tardis on the show ....had no idea that one statement made 50 years ago in the pilot episode would be held against them....(cant really blame them for that)

I would like to think its the third option, I mean she is his granddaughter ...probably ...(not opening that can of worms!) so who is to say what Susan did / did do.

Actually, I would say the people to blame would be the writers/producers/directors who first allowed other Time Lord time capsules to be called TARDIS. I don't think the meddling monk's one was called a TARDIS,

The first culprit was probably the War Games which called the suped-up but temporary capsules SIDRATs, thus deriving the name from TARDIS backwards. Then the second culprit would be in the Terror of the Autons when the Master's time machine was called a TARDIS. I think that was the first time that the "continuity error" crept in.

As with all continuity errors it just comes down to different production staff not having an encyclopedic photographic memory of every single episode but it's fun to come up with retrospective ways to explain these things!

The most annoying errors to me were when people referred to the Doctor as Doctor Who, like in the War Machines. Watching the documentaries on the old classics it's amazing how many of the old production staff and writers still call him Doctor Who even though it only crept into the show a few times. One of the times being the number plate on Bessie being "Who 1"

I think The War Machines was more like a programming error...

10 GET $TITLE, $NAME
20 IF $NAME="" THEN $NAME="Who?"
30 PRINT "Bring me "; $TITLE $NAME
40 GOTO 30
50 DATA "Doctor", ""

Exactly, this is why tv shows have "bibles" for the writers to follow...or not on some occasions...(yes I am looking at you Star Trek!) but I suppose the size of a "Who Bible" would be quite a beast to get though.

For the revival Chris Eccelston was named in the credits as "Doctor Who" which wasnt changed to "The Doctor" till David Tennant took over and carried on as such with Matt Smith.

I feel that the "Doctor Who" gag/reference has gotten a little out of hand and over used now and should be left alone!

I never noticed that!

If only they'd added a question mark when they first named the show it would have prevented all this confusion