A literal placeholder label meaning "male infant," rather than a traditional personal name.
Infantboy occupies a uniquely poignant place in the annals of naming: it is not a name at all in origin, but a bureaucratic placeholder assigned by hospitals when a child leaves without a name recorded. In American birth record systems, when parents have not yet settled on a name, the registrar fills in 'Infant Boy' or 'Infant Girl' as a temporary identifier. For most children this is swiftly replaced; for others, through administrative oversight, family circumstance, or deliberate inaction, the placeholder hardens into a legal given name.
The phenomenon was documented extensively by researchers studying Social Security Administration records, which contain thousands of individuals legally named Infant, Infantboy, or Babyboy. These names became the subject of journalism and policy discussion in the early twenty-first century, as digital record-keeping made the pattern visible at scale. For the individuals who bear these names into adulthood, the name carries a complicated history — sometimes a story of hardship or neglect, sometimes simply a bureaucratic accident that was never corrected.
Seen from a purely linguistic angle, Infantboy is a compound of the Latin 'infans' (not yet speaking, hence infant) and the Old English 'boi.' It is perhaps the only common English name whose etymology describes the absence of a name rather than the presence of one. Several people who bear this name have spoken publicly about it, some reclaiming it with dark humor, others having it legally changed. It stands as an accidental monument to the gap between administrative systems and the human act of naming.