From Old German elements meaning 'wild' and 'bright' or 'famous,' or from 'resolute fortress.'
Wilbur is an Old English name of sturdy Germanic stock, composed of "wil" (will, desire) and "burh" (fortress, fortified settlement) — a name whose literal meaning might be rendered as "resolute fortress" or "the one who wills the stronghold." It arrived in England with the Anglo-Saxon settlers and persisted through the Norman Conquest with the quiet stubbornness its meaning implies, never fashionable enough to be trendy, never obsolete enough to disappear entirely. In the nineteenth century it was a solid, respectable choice in Protestant America, the kind of name that appeared on county court dockets and church ledgers.
Wilbur's most consequential bearer arrived on December 17, 1903, at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina. Wilbur Wright, the elder of the two Wright brothers, was the primary theorist and the more reserved of the pair — a self-educated mechanical genius who had never finished high school but who solved the problem of three-axis flight control that had defeated every engineer before him. The first powered, sustained, controlled airplane flight lasted twelve seconds and changed the history of human civilization.
Wilbur died of typhoid fever in 1912 at forty-five, before he could fully see what he and his brother had set in motion. His name carries that achievement, and that poignant early exit. B.
White completed another kind of monument when he published "Charlotte's Web," giving the name to its gentle, innocent pig protagonist — a creature whose life is saved by friendship, loyalty, and the power of words. Wilbur the pig is one of the most beloved characters in children's literature, and his name acquired through that book a quality of sweetness and vulnerability that perfectly complements its older, more industrial associations. To name a child Wilbur in the twenty-first century is to invite both of these inheritances: the pioneer and the pig, the first flight and the spider's web.