Name Puns
Written by Herms (Kanzentai) from Daizenshuu EX Forums (2010-03-12)
Revised by SilverPlaqueVII
This is a list of origins of character names in the Dragon Ball franchise. Each character's name, particularly their original Japanese name, is a pun on regular words, often the names of various foods. This material might be in the manga canon and anime filler (for instance: Dragon Ball GT).
Pun explanation and whatnot. If there’s a quote from Akira Toriyama or a guidebook that leaves nothing more to add, I’ll quote that and not bother with this. [guide source, if any, are written in brackets]
Toriyama/Daizenshuu explanation: “Quotes from Toriyama or the daizenshuu on the source of the name.”
Source Spelling: The name’s source in Japanese (kanji or katakana or whatever) and Romanized.
Name Spelling: The actual character name in Japanese and Romanized. This way you can directly see what sort of alternations where made to the source to create the name. For names taken directly from the source without any changes (like Piccolo), I’ll just write “sama”.
FUNimation Name: Except when no English title can be traced to an English language dub or release, use the name of a character or thing as it is recognized in third-party publications. Here, I decided to use the Japanese names.
Sources for Toriyama and daizenshuu name pun confirmation are like this:
[D6]: Daizenshuu 6
[D10]: Daizenshuu 10
[DBF]: Dragon Ball Forever
[SEG]: Super Exciting Guide: Character Volume
[GTPF]: Dragon Ball GT Perfect Files Vol.1
Sometimes I’ll cite a guidebook without actually quoting from it, if it’s not really worth giving a full quote. Though, I decided to split those into three parts shown below here: