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Japan Know How

Arthur in Japanese

Arthur in Japanese

The name Arthur is written アーサー in Japanese.

アーサー

ā-sā

4 morae

Syllable by syllable

Arthur is 6 letters in English and 4 beats in Japanese. The two counts are close because Arthur is already built from syllables Japanese can take almost unchanged.

  1. アーā
  2. サー

The bar ー stretches the vowel before it across a second beat. It is not decoration: drop it and Arthur becomes a different word in Japanese.

Written vertically

アーサー

Vertical writing runs top to bottom, and columns run right to left. You will meet it on book spines, shop curtains, formal letters and name cards. One character in Arthur changes shape here: the long vowel bar lies down as a dash horizontally and stands upright vertically. It is the same mark, turned with the text.

In kanji: ateji suggestions

Ateji picks kanji for how they sound, not for what they mean — the same trick that writes America as 亜米利加. Every sound in Arthur has kanji that genuinely read that way, so these sets stay close to how the name is actually said.

亜沙

asecond; Asia
safine sand

阿佐

ahillside; an affectionate prefix
sato assist

These are suggestions built from sound, not a translation of your name. We can tell you how each character reads and what it means on its own; we cannot tell you what the combination looks like to a Japanese reader, and we will not tell you it is safe to have tattooed. For anything permanent, show the exact design to someone who reads Japanese fluently first.

How common is Arthur in America?

1921peak year
37thrank that year
155thrank in 2025
551,930born with it since 1880

18802025

It is coming back — more common now than it was a generation ago.

Source: US Social Security Administration, national data 1880–2025. Names given to fewer than five babies in a year are not published, so rare spellings are missing rather than absent.

Arthur in Japanese name divination

2 1 3 1 = 7 strokes

NumberStrokesReadingMeaning
地格 Earth7大吉 AuspiciousIndependence
総格 Total7大吉 AuspiciousIndependence

地格 Earth — The given name alone. Traditionally read as early life.

総格 Total — Every stroke in the name. Read as the whole life.

Only two of the five numbers can be calculated from a given name alone. Add a family name in the converter to see all five.

Seimei handan is a traditional Japanese practice, not a prediction. The stroke counts are arithmetic and verifiable; the readings attached to them are folklore, and schools disagree. We use the Kumazaki classification, which is the most widely published one.

This name comes to 7 strokes, which this school reads as 大吉. 15 of the 81 numbers in the table share that reading.

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