Saburo

Meaning of Saburo

Saburo is a masculine Japanese given name formed from the Sino-Japanese morphemes for “three” (三, san) and “son” (郎, rō), and has traditionally functioned as an ordinal designation for a family’s third-born male offspring. Its phonetic realization in Japanese, [saˌbuːroː], reflects the language’s precise mora-timed prosody, with equal temporal weight allotted to each syllabic unit. From 1916 through 1929, archival birth records in Hawaii—where significant Japanese immigrant populations established steady demographic presence—register annual occurrences of the name Saburo ranging from five to twenty, corresponding to popularity ranks between thirtieth and forty-first among male names; this data underscores both the retention of homeland onomastic customs and the nuanced integration of cultural identity within the diaspora. In contemporary usage, Saburo remains relatively uncommon outside families that prioritize traditional naming protocols or seek appellations with explicit semantic referents and unambiguous linguistic provenance. As an appellation, Saburo thus encapsulates a confluence of linguistic precision, historical continuity and culturally specific naming conventions.