An East Asian name written as 悟空 in Japanese, meaning "awakened to emptiness" or "empty sky," with mythic-literary ties.
Goku is the Japanese pronunciation of the Chinese name 悟空 (Wùkōng), composed of the characters for "enlightenment" or "comprehension" (悟) and "emptiness" or "sky" (空). The name belongs first and most famously to Sun Wukong, the Monkey King protagonist of Wu Cheng'en's sixteenth-century Chinese epic novel *Journey to the West* (西遊記), one of the four great classical novels of Chinese literature. Sun Wukong — irreverent, immensely powerful, spiritually restless — undertakes a journey that transforms him from chaos incarnate into a being of genuine wisdom, and his name encapsulates that arc: to comprehend emptiness is to approach enlightenment.
The name crossed into global cultural consciousness through Akira Toriyama's manga and anime series *Dragon Ball*, first published in 1984. Toriyama's Son Goku is an explicit homage to Sun Wukong — a boy with a monkey tail, a staff, and supernatural strength who grows into Earth's greatest protector. *Dragon Ball* became one of the best-selling manga franchises in history, and Son Goku became arguably the most recognized fictional character in Japan and one of the most recognized worldwide, profoundly influencing superhero media, gaming, and global pop culture for four decades.
As a given name outside Japan, Goku is almost exclusively chosen in tribute to the fictional character rather than the classical literary tradition. It has appeared on birth records in Brazil, the United States, and across Latin America — regions with particularly passionate *Dragon Ball* fan communities. Naming a child Goku is a declaration of values as much as heritage: strength, determination, boundless growth, and an almost innocent refusal to give up. The name carries enormous narrative weight and immediate recognizability.