Pokémon

Satoshi Tajiri grew up in Machida, in the Tokyo metropolitan area, catching insects in vacant lots in the 1970s. As the city expanded and the lots disappeared under concrete, he transferred the hobby to a notebook, cataloging creatures by type and behavior. In 1989 he pitched a game to Nintendo based on that childhood obsession: players would collect and trade small monsters through a Game Boy link cable, the cable standing in for the nets he once lowered into ponds. The game's working title was Capsule Monsters.

Nintendo's lawyers found trademark conflicts with Capsule Monsters, so the project was renamed. Tajiri and his collaborator Ken Sugimori settled on Pocket Monsters, shortened to Poketto Monsutā in Japanese. Both components were already English loanwords inside Japanese: pocket had entered Japanese from English in the early twentieth century (itself from Old French poche and before that a Germanic root meaning bag), and monster traced back through English and French to Latin monstrum, something that warns or portends. The compressed form, Pokémon, appeared in promotional materials from 1995 onward.

The games launched in Japan in February 1996 for Game Boy, selling steadily until the trading card game and animated television series followed in the same year. By 1998, Nintendo of America had released Pokémon Red and Blue, translating the name intact. English speakers received a Japanese portmanteau of their own language back to them, and most had no idea. The accent mark over the e was kept to signal that both syllables were pronounced, preventing the word from being read as poke-mon in two beats.

Pokémon Go in 2016 made the word a global noun in a new sense, no longer tied to a game console but attached to the act of locating digital creatures in physical space. The franchise had by then sold over 440 million video games and 43 billion trading cards. The word is now used as a common noun in dozens of languages, rarely parsed as the compressed portmanteau it is. The notebook Tajiri kept as a child became the most commercially successful media franchise in history.