General Anime Questions

[Alzrius]

All right, I CAN answer with the Dragonball questions...

"Z" stands for "Zen"--or so I've been told...

You've been told wrong. The "Z" in Dragonball Z has no intrinsic meaning.

When Toriyama did the manga, it never had the letter "Z" at the end. It was Dragonball the entire way through, from when we first meet Goku in the beginning to after the Buu saga.

When the TV series was under production, Toei Studios decided that, given how the focus shifted at the beginning of the Saiyan saga to more of an action-fighter series than an adventure series, to retool things with a new name, opening theme, etc. Informed of their decision, Toriyama chose the letter "Z" simply because its the end of the English alphabet, having an implied meaning of final, or the end. Beyond that though, it doesn't stand for any particular word.

 

[dreaded_beast]

on a similar note to the whole letter scheme, Japanese cars (imports), use letters to denote the "higher quality cars" (although in this case, i believe most of these letters have meanings),

Type R
Type S
GT-R
Si

i think it is a Japanese culture thing