Choe
surname · Korean · Latin script
Recorded for both men and women· direction only, no split published
Choe is a surname, with more bearers in South Korea than in any other country, where it is the 4th most common surname. It appears chiefly in Korean and English, written in the Latin script. Recorded meaning: Variant of Choi.
- KRSouth Korea1 in 22◐
- KPNorth Korea1 in 110
- HKHong Kong1 in 342
carrying the name, one hue, darker where it is more common. Hover a country for its figure.
- ≈2.4M ●
- #56 ●
- 2 ●
- Sources
- 421 ●
- 1 in 22 ◐
across 14 countries
of 21M surnames
recorded for this name
3.2M records
Official registry-verified
South Korea
Spellings & scripts●
Locally spelled Choi in US United States, AU Australia, CA Canada and 11 more, Cho in NO Norway, DE Germany, IT Italy and 4 more and 최 in KR South Korea, MO Macao, PL Poland and 1 more.
Spellings marked ● are how people bearing the name write it in our records; ○ marks a model's transliteration. Click a spelling to open its page.
Meaning & origin●
- Cantonese蔡coi³◐via Choi
- EnglishChoi◐via Choi
- Korean최崔◐via Choi
Steps marked ◐ come from the entry for the form named above them, not from this name's own sources.
Variant of Choi.
Sources 1
Attested across 3 languages in the etymology graph.
Where in the world●
Sorted by bearers counted by national registers, records where none counts.
| Country | Most common spelling | Sources | |||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| KR South Korea | #4 | 2,340,582 | 2.2M rec. | 1 in 22 | 2.4M | 최 | 276 |
| US United States | #285 | 50,786 | 831K rec. | 1 in 6.5K | 55K | Choi | 421 |
| AU Australia | #213 | 35,001 | 34K rec. | — | 3 | Choi | 166 |
| CA Canada | #155 | 30,189 | 30K rec. | — | 1 | Choi | 166 |
| GB United Kingdom | #890 | 24,052 | 27K rec. | — | 4 | Choi | 143 |
| MY Malaysia | #274 | 14,304 | 9.3K rec. | — | — | Choi | 76 |
| HK Hong Kong | #43 | 8,657 | 9K rec. | — | — | Choi | 113 |
| PH Philippines | — | 5,093 | 4.1K rec. | — | — | Choi | 63 |
| ES Spain | — | 3,659△ | 1.3K rec. | 1 in 14K | 3.7K | — | 40 |
| DE Germany | — | 2,988 | 3.1K rec. | — | 1 | Cho | 97 |
| SG Singapore | #200 | 2,812 | 3.4K rec. | — | — | Choi | 92 |
| CN China | — | 1,983 | 1.6K rec. | — | listed | Choi | 70 |
Roughly 2.3M people in South Korea bear this name (about 1 in 22). Estimates project the name's share of our records onto national population, so each is only as good as the record base beside it — the Basis column gives that base; rows marked △ rest on fewer records than the estimate itself and are order-of-magnitude at best.
Country figures for a list of names, at full precision, are available under licence rather than by scraping this table. How that works.
Languages●
- Korean3.5M58%
- English2.5M41%
- Spanish3.6K1%
- 3K1%
- Khmer1.5K1%
Show as table
| Name | Records | Note |
|---|---|---|
| Korean | 3,495,757 | 58% |
| English | 2,484,420 | 41% |
| Spanish | 3,643 | 1% |
| 3,001 | 1% | |
| Khmer | 1,490 | 1% |
Language is read off each record's context, not declared by the bearer; a share is of all records for this spelling.
Other recorded senses●
Choe is also recorded in 2 other lexicons, as a different name or as an ordinary word. These are senses of the spelling, not of the name above.
In fro, jackdaw
as a wordkaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations)
In wuu, Deficient
as a wordAn English-Chinese Vocabulary of the Shanghai Dialect
Ordered by how much of this spelling's record each language holds, so a sense from a language the name is barely used in sits last rather than first.
Notable people with this name●
- Choi Hong-hib. 1918KPnot in their usual nameKorean army general and martial artist (1918–2002)
- Choi Kyu-hahb. 1919KRnot in their usual name4th President of South Korea (1919–2006)
- Daniel C. Tsuib. 1939USnot in their usual nameChinese-American physicist, Nobel laureate
- Choe Ryong-haeb. 1950KPChairman of the Presidium of the Supreme People's Assembly of North Korea
- Choi Min-sikb. 1962KRnot in their usual nameSouth Korean actor
- Kenneth Choib. 1971USnot in their usual nameAmerican actor
- T.O.Pb. 1987KRnot in their usual nameSouth Korean rapper, singer, songwriter and actor (born 1987)
- Choi Woo-shikb. 1990KRnot in their usual nameCanadian actor
- Choi Min-hob. 1991KRnot in their usual nameSouth Korean rapper, singer and actor
- Sullib. 1994KRnot in their usual nameSouth Korean singer and actress (1994-2019)
The ten people covered by the most Wikipedia language editions — a proxy for cross-cultural notability, which favours historical and Western figures over equally prominent contemporary ones — shown by birth year. Source: Wikidata (CC0).
Evidence●
Attested in 30 sources across 18 countries.
| Country | Register | Year | Count | Rank |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| KR South Korea | KOSIS — 2015 census surnames | 2015 | 2.4M | #5 |
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2010 | 2010 | 7.8K | #4,560 |
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2020 | 2020 | 7.7K | #4,458 |
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2000 | 2000 | 6.9K | #4,682 |
| US United States | Census Bureau — First Name Frequency 2020 by sex | 2020 | 124 | #44,846 |
| AR Argentina | RENAPER — Apellidos (person counts, national) | — | 91 | — |
| BR Brazil | IBGE — Censo 2022 Nomes no Brasil per-token lookup (v3 API, given+surname) | — | 69 | #83,359 |
| BR Brazil | IBGE — names by decade (Kaggle mirror) | 2022 | 48 | — |
| BR Brazil | IBGE — Censo 2022 Nomes no Brasil per-token lookup (v3 API, given+surname) | — | 45 | #68,557 |
| BR Brazil | IBGE — Censo 2022 Nomes no Brasil per-token lookup (v3 API, given+surname) | 2020 | 38 | — |
| PL Poland | dane.gov.pl — PESEL living persons (surnames) | 2026 | 37 | — |
| PL Poland | dane.gov.pl — PESEL living persons (names) | — | 37 | #60,507 |
Reference works 3
- Nederlandse FamilienamenBank (Dutch surname bank; ex-Meertens Instituut, now CBG)2007
- Wikipedia surname tokens
- Wikidata name items (native-script + romanized given/family names)
These works list the name; their figures are licensed and are not reproduced here.
Register rows as of the 2026-09-12 data build · 52 rows in the corpus for this spelling.
Frequently asked questions
- How common is the name Choe?
- We estimate roughly 2.4 million people bear Choe (counting its spellings and scripts) across 14 countries in our records.
- In which country does Choe have the most bearers?
- We estimate about 2.3 million people bear Choe in South Korea, more than in any other country in our records, where it is most often spelled 최.
- Where is Choe most common?
- Choe is densest in South Korea, where the national register counts about 1 in 22 people carrying it.
- How common is Choe compared with other names?
- In South Korea, Choe is the 4th most common surname of 14,083 surnames recorded there.
- What does the name Choe mean?
- Recorded meaning: Variant of Choi.
Query this name via API
curl https://api.mondonomo.ai/api/v1/name-graph/choeThe same payload this page is built from: spellings and scripts, countries and languages, related names, and the registers that attest the form. Rate-limited for casual use. Bulk access and licensing.
About this data
Data snapshot . Figures are rebuilt periodically and will change.
Statistics are aggregated from the Mondonomo name corpus; related names and etymology are inferred from the name graph; pronunciation and any machine-marked transliterations are model-generated. Read how the numbers are made, including their known failure modes, and where the data comes from.
Reference works we consult — surname dictionaries, official name registers, Wikidata and Wiktionary — are named directly, beside the claims they support. The per-country source counts also include datasets of person records: we publish how many there are and their authority tier, but not their names.
Cite this page Mondonomo, “Choe” — the 4th most common surname in South Korea. Data snapshot 2026-09-12.