Gwangju

Name: Gwangju: recorded bearers, distribution and rank
Creator: Mondonomo
Published: 2026-09-12

loc · Korean · Latin script

Recorded for both men and women· direction only, no split published

Gwangju is a name, most frequently recorded in South Korea. In North Korea it is the 51st most common given name. It appears chiefly in Korean and English, written in the Latin script.

rarermore common

KRSouth Korea1 in 1.8K◐
SGSingapore1 in 9.7K
MYMalaysia1 in 14K

carrying the name, one hue, darker where it is more common. Hover a country for its figure.

: ≈2.3K ●
Sources: 208 ●
: 1 in 155K ◐

Spellings & scripts●

KWangLatin · English●44K records

One other spelling is counted as the same name:

Gwang3.1K

Locally spelled Kwang in US United States, KR South Korea, MY Malaysia and 23 more and Gwang in ZA South Africa.

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

No verified etymology recorded for this name yet — the entries below are drawn from usage statistics and the name graph.

Attested across 2 languages in the etymology graph.

Where in the world●

Sorted by bearers counted by national registers, records where none counts.

Where Gwangju is recorded, by country
Country						Most common spelling	Sources
KR South Korea	—	7,294	3.7K rec.	—	—	KWang	142
MY Malaysia	—	4,683	4.9K rec.	—	—	KWang	52
US United States	—	2,153	68K rec.	1 in 155K	2.2K	KWang	208
GB United Kingdom	—	1,976	2.1K rec.	—	—	KWang	31
AU Australia	—	1,751	1.9K rec.	—	—	KWang	56
CA Canada	—	1,598	1.7K rec.	—	—	KWang	39
SG Singapore	#479	1,114	1.6K rec.	—	—	KWang	77
AR Argentina	—	836	727 rec.	—	—	KWang	15
KP North Korea	#51	345	235 rec.	—	1	KWang	39
CN China	—	336	74 rec.	—	—	KWang	17
IT Italy	—	262	291 rec.	—	—	KWang	4
DE Germany	—	210	207 rec.	—	—	KWang	41
CO Colombia	—	178	185 rec.	—	—	KWang	12
PH Philippines	—	158	230 rec.	—	—	KWang	10
TW Taiwan	—	148	47 rec.	—	—	KWang	37
GT Guatemala	—	142	149 rec.	—	—	KWang	5
SV El Salvador	—	112	117 rec.	—	—	KWang	2
PK Pakistan	—	106	183 rec.	—	—	KWang	2
CL Chile	—	94	57 rec.	—	—	KWang	11
MX Mexico	—	70	78 rec.	—	—	KWang	17
AT Austria	—	68	79 rec.	—	—	KWang	6
PY Paraguay	—	57	99 rec.	—	—	KWang	6
SE Sweden	—	55△	15 rec.	1 in 186K	55	—	5
BR Brazil	—	47	145 rec.	1 in 4.5M	50	KWang	24
PL Poland	—	28	36 rec.	1 in 1.4M	28	KWang	8
NL Netherlands	—	13	1.2K rec.	1 in 1.3M	13	KWang	6
ES Spain	—	13	141 rec.	—	—	KWang	7
ZA South Africa	—	11	94 rec.	—	—	Gwang	8
FI Finland	—	—	14 rec.	—	25	—	2
GY Guyana	—	—	22 rec.	—	13	—	3

Country figures for a list of names, at full precision, are available under licence rather than by scraping this table. How that works.

Languages●

Korean73615%
English2305%
Chinese1764%
Malay141%
Spanish81%

Show as table

Languages in which the name is recorded
Name	Records	Note
Korean	736	15%
English	230	5%
Chinese	176	4%
Malay	14	1%
Spanish	8	1%

Language is read off each record's context, not declared by the bearer; a share is of all records for this spelling.

Notable people with this name●

Kwang-ju Kimb. 1910KRnot in their usual nameSouth Korean journalist

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●

No register attests this spelling yet

None of the official registers or reference works in our corpus lists Gwangju under this spelling. The statistics on this page rest on person records, and the related names are inferred from the name graph.

Frequently asked questions

How common is the name Gwangju?: We estimate roughly 2.3 thousand people bear Gwangju (counting its spellings and scripts) across 5 countries in our records.
In which country does Gwangju have the most bearers?: Gwangju is most frequently recorded in South Korea, where it is most often spelled KWang.
How common is Gwangju compared with other names?: In North Korea, Gwangju is the 51st most common given name of 2,373 given names recorded there.

Query this name via API

curl https://api.mondonomo.ai/api/v1/name-graph/gwangju

The 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

● measured from records◐ inferred from the name graph○ machine-generated

Data snapshot 2026-09-12. 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, “Gwangju” — the 51st most common given name in North Korea. Data snapshot 2026-09-12.

See how Gwangju parses inside a full name →