Takahashi said she gave the character's name a lot of thought; because the series deals with "a lot of entangled elements in an effective way" she named him Ranma taken from the proverb , which can roughly be translated into English as "tackling plenty of tasks diligently." However, when asked how she came up with it in another interview years later, Takahashi simply said she thought it would be a cute name for either a boy or girl. Male Ranma's name is written using kanji, while female Ranma's name is written in hiragana as . The manga artist gave Ranma a pigtail to make the character easy to identify regardless of whether he was in his male or female form. Because a pigtail pairs well with Chinese clothes, she then decided to make him a martial artist.
