History Main / WordSaladTitle

->''"[[TheTalesOfBeedleTheBard Babbity Rabbity and her Cackling Stump]] is the stupidest title ever written by man or beast and of course when I wrote it, I never- I had not, at the point, when I gave Ron that title, I didn't imagine for a second that I was actually going to write the story."''
-->-- '''JKRowling''', on combining this trope with {{Defictionalisation}}.

* ''FinalFantasy'' has become a WordSaladTitle retroactively. At the time of its development, Squaresoft was on the brink of bankruptcy and decided to go out with a bang, producing one big "[[GallowsHumor final fantasy]]". To everyone's surprise, the game became a monster hit and went on to set the standard for nearly all [=J-RPG=]s that followed in its wake. Twenty-some years later and we're now up to ''FinalFantasyXIV'' '''and counting''', and that's not including all the spin-off games, re-releases, and cross-media tie-in productions.
** Some of the side-games have some impressively strange and difficult to understand names. "Dirge of Cerberus" refers to the main character's gun and symbol. "Advent Children" is an ironic comparison of Christ to Sephiroth (and there are also a lot of children). "Revenant Wings" might be referring to the lack of emotion of the winged-species, or perhaps the various undead winged-villains. It gets worse: "Final Fantasy Versus XIII" and "Final Fantasy Agito XIII". Who even knows what all that even means?

* ''Syphon Filter''. For some reason, the virus which plays a part in at least the earlier games is called the "syphon filter" virus, as though it was derived from something deadly to tank-kept fish. Late 1990s to early 2000 stealth games seemingly had a word salad title as a TRC.

*** while not being the above troper, this troper can answer that. the FEV was for evolving things not sorting them or ethnic cleansing, it was to make the strong, stronger and destroy the weaker just like the trope for Darwinist wants to, cause if this troper remembers correctly it killed more people that it mutated/evolved not to mention the fact that the FEV has many mods and variations so the original PURPOSE of the virus may fall by the wayside such as President John Henry Eden's kill [[spoiler: all the unclean Wastelanders]] FEV does.

* ''KingdomHearts'' is starting to venture into this territory. The first ElectricBoogaloo subtitle was ''ChainOfMemories'', which sounded pretty cool even before explanation. After ''KingdomHeartsII'', though, there was ''Coded'', which did kinda make sense...and now we have the DS and PSP games ''358/2 Days'' (pronounced Three-Five-Eight Days Over Two) and ''Birth by Sleep'' respectively. ''358/2 Days'' is feasibly explained by the game taking place over the course of, well, 358 days for two people. As of this writing, ''Birth by Sleep'' has yet to be released and explained.

* Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, while on the one hand being an example of ExactlyWhatItSaysOnTheTin, is an excellent example of this trope.

* Much of CAKE's discography: ''Motorcade of Generosity'', ''Fashion Nugget'', ''Comfort Eagle'', ''Pressure Chief''.

* Example dy JimiHendrix: "Spanish Castle Magic".
* By PinkFloyd: The album "Atom Heart Mother". WordOfGod sais it really has no meaning.

* ''{{Bakuman}}'' has this with [[ShowWithinAShow manga with a manga]]: the various fictional titles of manga run in ''Shonen Jump'' range from "Otters 11" to "Cheese Okaki". Of course, it doesn't help that you have no idea what those series are about.

*** "Four Arms to Killing You" and "Superchunky from Hell" make sense in context. The former involves an Arrancar with [[MultiArmedAndDangerou four (latter six) arms]] trying to kill [[BadAss Kenpachi]] [[BloodKnight Zaraki]]. The latter is about a [[spoiler: giant blob-shaped hollow coming from Hueco Mundo to aid in Aizen's attack. Superchunky even became the huge thing's FanNickname]]

* In and of itself, Pokemon sounds nonsensical, but is in fact short for Pocket Monster (or, to directly transliterate from Japanese, Poketto Monsutaa).

*** The detective team story was a throw-away premise to get the show produced, since "a group of anthropomorphic food items fight crime" sounds like more of a show than "a group of anthropomorphic food items… do stuff." The title might have simply been part of that.

*** The detective team story was a throw-away premise to get the show produced, since "a group of anthropomorphic food items fight crime" sounds like more of a show than "a group of anthropomorphic food items… do stuff." The title might have simply been part of that.

Not to be confused with ColonCancer: InWhichATropeIsDescribed. Mad Lib [[MadLibThrillerTitle Thriller]] and [[MadLibFantasyTitle Fantasy]] Titles may or may not be this.

Not to be confused with ColonCancer: InWhichATropeIsDescribed. [[MadLibThrillerTitle Other]] Mad Lib [[MadLibFantasyTitle titles]] may or may not be this.

See also MadLibAnimeTitle. See also GoryDeadlyOverkillTitleOfFatalDeath, for when horror movies do this. A related trope would be WordSaladLyrics. Not to be confused with MadLibThrillerTitle, or ColonCancer: InWhichATropeIsDescribed.

The persistent practice of using titles that look like someone mashed together random words lifted out of an English dictionary. At worst, they will be as meaningless as "Super Punk Octo Pudding Gas Mark Seven", and at best, they will just cryptically allude to the show's premise or characters while trying to make a clever Western pop-culture reference. Basically, GratuitousEnglish as applied to show names.

See also MadLibAnimeTitle.
See also GoryDeadlyOverkillTitleOfFatalDeath, for when horror movies do this.
A related trope would be WordSaladLyrics.

* Many of the tropes names on ThisVeryWiki don't make much sense.

<<|AnimeTropes|>>[[anime]]

* NeutralMilkHotel, along with fellow Elephant 6 bands The Apples in Stereo and The Olivia Tremor Control.
* Wilco's Yankee Hotel Foxtrot.

* NeutralMilkHotel, along with fellow Elephant 6 band The Apples in Stereo.

* Given anime's innate tendency to have English titles written by a populace that doesn't have English as a primary language, examples are nearly a dime a dozen.

*''TheHudsuckerProxy'' Like ''TheShawshankRedemption'', this one makes sense only if you watch the movie, as Tim Robbins' character acts as a stand-in decision maker (proxy) for Hudsucker Industries' executives and shareholders.

* ''FruitsBasket'' is named after a Japanese kids' game also called "Fruits Basket". Makes logical, if not grammatic, sense.
** The problem comes from Japanese lacking a ''tu'' syllable - it's ''tsu'' or ''to'' - with the result that so many English words ending in ''t'' get an extraneous final -s when transliterated into Japanese.
*** In particular, "fruit" has issues in the fact that Japanese does not have distinct R and L consonants; ''furuuto'' is the transliteration of "flute", so "fruit" is stuck with ''furuutsu''.
*** Or maybe they simply thought it'"Fruits Basket" because a fruit basket usually contains more than one fruit.
** Which almost makes this an examples of {{Woolseyism}} by BlindIdiotTranslation, since the name "Fruit Basket" would have been rather dull, unless they changed it to "Fruit Basket Upset."
*** Though ''Fruit Basket'' is an American colloquialism for [[IThoughtItMeant Lunatic]].

*** Now we know he's just messing with us.
**Rumor was that he called it bleach because in his cleaning supplies the bleach was right next to the Resolve, and resolve is a major character trait.