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    The show means "Pocket Devils"

    Someone saw me in Art Class one day putting together a pokemon puzzle (OK, it was meant for 4-year-olds, but there was nothing else to do!) when some people approached me about how evil the show is.  However, the only way they could "prove" this was by saying that the show means "Pocket Devils."  I tried to explain to these people that it meant "Pocket Monsters," but they wouldn't listen.

    Anyway, the show's title does NOT mean Pocket Devils.  Anyone with a basic understanding of Japanese can tell you that.  I'll walk through the title step-by-step for those of you who need it.

    Pokemon=POKETTO MONSUTAA

    Pokemon is an abbreviation of Pocket Monster.  The Japanese writing system is somewhat limited when compared to the romanized (the system we use) system.  In Japanese, every consonant (except n) has to be followed by a vowel.  There is no symbol for "m," but instead you have "ma," "me," "mi," "mo," and "mu."    You don't have a symbol for "k," but instead have "ka," "ke," "ki," "ko," and "ku."  Therefore, in Japanese, you cannot have such characters as "ck" "st" "th" and so on.  So, they have to improvise.

    POKETTO is the closest the Japanese language can get to "Pocket."  When dealing with foreign words, the Japanese language spells it out phonetically.  You can't have the "ck" sound, so a single "k" has to do.  If you didn't have the two "t"'s in poketto, the pronunciation would be off.  And the "o" at the end is just there because you cannot write a "t" by itself in Japanese.

    MONSUTAA is the same way.  The "su" is there because you can't have the letter "s" by itself.  The "taa" substitutes the "ter," as an "a" is often used in place of "-er" sounds.

    Pokemon is an abbreviation.  They took the first two characters of poketto ("po" and "ke") and combined it with the first two characters of monsutaa ("mo" and "n") to create a new word--Pokemon.

    And now you know.  I hope I explained it well enough.  So, in summary, what it took me four paragraphs to write is this:  Pokemon means Pocket Monsters, not Pocket Devils.
    Pocket Monsters was not created by me.  It was created by Satoshi Tajiri and the crew at TV-Tokyo.  Pokemon is (c) Game Freak, Nintendo, 4Kids Productions, Hasbro, Bandai, and a ton of other companies. When you have a popular anime like Pokemon, lots of people own it so it's impossible to list every company who owns a piece of Pokemon.  No infringement of copyrights is meant by the creation of the web site.  All images were gotten from official websites (Nintendo, TV-Tokyo, etc.) unless otherwise noted (I don't steal images from other sites!).