IT's blue and can be used as ‘the gateway to everything that ever was or ever can be’.

And now the Doctor's multipurpose tool and get-out-of-jail-free card - the sonic screwdriver - has been added to the Oxford English Dictionary.

It joins Doctor Who's existing entries in the OED for TARDIS, Dalek, and Cyberman.

The OED's blog post says: "The Doctor’s sonic device has been through many redesigns and refits since its debut in the 1968 Second Doctor story ‘Fury from the Deep’, when it was used to open a hatch on a gas pipeline, and closely resembled a pen torch.

"Over the years it’s opened countless doors, hatches, and ventilation grilles, has been used to detonate mines and to ignite clouds of marsh gas to ward off marauding Drashigs, to intercept transmat beams, to cut and fuse metal, as a medical scanner, and as a remote control.

"This versatile tool has also served as a hard drive capable of holding the entirety of a human personality, and a computer that spent hundreds of years calculating the sonic wavelengths needed to disintegrate a wooden door that turned out to be open all along.

"It was destroyed by a Tereleptil renegade just before the Great Fire of London during the Fifth Doctor’s era, only to return, bigger and more useful than ever, in the revived series in 2005.

"Outside of the Whoniverse, the sonic screwdriver has become a type of ultimate tool of the future, and has inspired real-life attempts to mimic the Gallifreyan technology, including a large tabletop machine created by Dundee University scientists, which is capable of lifting and turning objects using beams of ultrasound."