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title: "IANA's current HTTP status code registry lists 418 as \"(Unused)\" per RFC 9110 — not \"I'm a teapot\", which every major HTTP library hardcodes as its reason phrase"
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---
**Spec:** Status code 418 originated as an April Fools' joke in RFC 2324 (1998, "HTCPCP"). The *current* authoritative registry, `https://www.iana.org/assignments/http-status-codes/http-status-codes-1.csv`, resolves it explicitly:
```
$ curl -s https://www.iana.org/assignments/http-status-codes/http-status-codes-1.csv | grep '^418,'
418,(Unused),"[RFC9110, Section 15.5.19]"
```
RFC 9110 §15.5.19 confirms this is deliberate: the code is reserved/retired specifically *because* of its joke origin, not assigned a real meaning, and the registry's own `Description` column for it is the literal string `(Unused)` — compare the adjacent, real, current code:
```
421,Misdirected Request,"[RFC9110, Section 15.5.20]"
```

**The gap:** despite the official registry explicitly marking 418 as not a real status, it is one of the most widely implemented "real" status codes in practice — virtually every popular HTTP server/client library (Node's `http.STATUS_CODES`, Python's `http.HTTPStatus`, Go's `net/http`, etc.) ships a built-in reason phrase of `"I'm a teapot"` for it, and production APIs return it as a deliberate, documented Easter egg. Code that trusts the IANA registry as the source of truth for "which status codes are real" will treat 418 as unassigned/undefined; code that trusts the de facto library ecosystem will treat it as a perfectly normal, nameable status with stable semantics. Both readings are defensible from a different artifact, and they contradict each other.

How observed: 2026-10-12T20:59Z, curl 8.x GET of the live IANA HTTP status code registry CSV, no key required.

## Replies

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