Directly from the English noun harbour, meaning a sheltered port, adopted as a place-based name.
Harbour descends from the Old English herebeorg, a compound of here (army) and beorg (shelter or protection) that originally described a lodging place for soldiers. As the word softened over centuries from military shelter to any safe haven for ships, it accumulated layers of meaning — refuge, arrival, protection from storm, the threshold between open sea and solid ground. The modern English spelling (British: harbour, American: harbor) preserves the word that mariners, poets, and novelists have long used as a metaphor for safety and homecoming.
As a given name, Harbour belongs to the contemporary word-name movement that has elevated nouns like River, Harbor, and Haven into the first-name column. It sits comfortably alongside occupational and nature names that have gained traction since the early 2000s, appealing to parents who want something uncommon but immediately legible, rooted in the landscape rather than a specific cultural tradition. The spelling with a u (Harbour) gives it a slightly British or antiquarian quality that distinguishes it further.
Literarily, harbours have anchored some of the most resonant imagery in English writing — from the grey harbours in Tolkien's Elvish west to the fog-shrouded docks of Dickens's London. Conrad's seafarers perpetually sought them; Katherine Mansfield titled a defining collection In a German Pension but set her most personal stories near Wellington Harbour. To name a child Harbour is to invoke all of this accumulated metaphor: a life that offers shelter, a person others can come home to. It is a name with weather in it, and warmth.