Kym

given name · English · Latin script

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

Kym is a given name, most frequently recorded in South Korea, where it is the 5th most common surname. It appears chiefly in English and , written in the Latin script.

rarermore common
  • KRSouth Korea1 in 23
  • AUAustralia1 in 827
  • USUnited States1 in 1.3K

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

≈273K

across 10 countries

#97

of 21M surnames

Sources
569

5.9M records

Official registry-verified

1 in 1.3K

United States

Spellings & scripts

KimLatin · English13M records

Locally spelled Kim in KR South Korea, US United States, AU Australia and 20 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

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

Attested across 4 languages in the etymology graph.

Where in the world

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

Where Kym is recorded, by country
CountryMost common spellingSources
KR South Korea#511,145,3712.4K rec.11MKim12
US United States#132262,3524.7M rec.1 in 1.3K274KKim569
AU Australia#70111,942272K rec.40Kim284
GB United Kingdom#49446,148265K rec.5Kim272
CA Canada#9043,215153K rec.2Kim239
MY Malaysia#11729,37533K rec.Kim112
DE Germany#34922,29975K rec.Kim229
JP Japan15,35314K rec.Kim144
NL Netherlands#12912,85633K rec.26KKim155
PH Philippines9,11251K rec.Kim164
EG Egypt#5045,91713K rec.Kim47
IT Italy#4175,20525K rec.Kim104

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

Languages

  • English81K83%
  • 5K5%
  • Spanish2.6K3%
  • Khmer1.4K1%
  • French1.1K1%
Show as table
Languages in which the name is recorded
NameRecordsNote
English80,99483%
4,9675%
Spanish2,6483%
Khmer1,3571%
French1,1421%

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

Other names spelled this way

Kym is also recorded as 4 other names, grouped separately because the records behind them do not connect to the one described above.

  • Vietnamese given name766 records spelled Kym2 spellings in the group

    Most recorded in Vietnam, United States, United Kingdom, Canada

    Also written Kim Sa

  • Russian surname424 records spelled Kym32 spellings in the group

    Most recorded in Russia, Kazakhstan, Ukraine, Kyrgyzstan

    Languages: Russian, Ukrainian, Belarusian

    Also written Ким, Кім, Kim, Кым, Гим

  • Italian given name192 records spelled Kym2 spellings in the group

    Most recorded in United States, United Kingdom, Canada

    Also written Kým

  • a separate given name161 records spelled Kym2 spellings in the group

    Most recorded in United States

    Also written Kÿm

49 further groups record this spelling and are not listed here.

Grouping is the name graph's, not a register's: two spellings join a group when the evidence links them, so a group is a claim about the records rather than about the people.

Other recorded senses

Kym is also recorded in one other lexicon, as a different name or as an ordinary word. These are senses of the spelling, not of the name above.

  • In Turkish, initialism of Kırmızı, Yeşil, Mavi (RGB)

    as a wordkaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations)

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.

Over time

050100150200196019802000179 · 1959

Show as table
Kym in SA BDM — Popular baby names South Australia (1944–present), Australia, 1944–2015
Yearrecords
19444
19458
194625
194730
194836
194930
195037
195153
195280
195380
1954113
1955100
1956147
1957163
1958170
1959179
1960159
1961125
1962112
196395
196465
196572
196666
196759
196854
196960
197049
197154
197253
197353
197451
197546
197635
197736
197831
197939
198032
198145
198228
198326
198421
198518
198616
198720
198815
19899
199011
19916
19924
19938
19943
19951
19962
19973
19982
19992
20001
20023
20031
20051
20061
20071
20091
20101
20112
20121
20131
20151

AU SA BDM — Popular baby names South Australia (1944–present)68 years between 1944–2015. One register's own figures, never a sum across registers: two registers counting the same people would double them.

Notable people with this name

1940196019802000Kym Gyngell, b. 1952Kym Karath, b. 1958Kym Mazelle, b. 1960Kym Whitley, b. 1961Kym Hampton, b. 1962Kym Barrett, b. 1965Kym Wilson, b. 1973Kym Marsh, b. 1976Kym Howe, b. 1980Kym Jackson, b. 1983

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 36 sources across 22 countries.

Official registers attesting Kym
CountryRegisterYearCountRank
US United StatesCensus Bureau — First Name Frequency 2020 by sex20202.4K#6,068
US United StatesCensus Bureau — First Name Frequency 2020 by sex2020287#6,068
CH SwitzerlandBFS — Familiennamen der Wohnbevölkerung (surnames)2024259#5,015
AU AustraliaAU state BDM — consolidated top baby names (NSW + SA + QLD)198240
AU AustraliaQLD BDM — Top 100 Baby Names Queensland (1960–present)198240
SE SwedenSkatteverket — Sök hur många som har ett visst namn (living population)33#17,506
BR BrazilIBGE — names by decade (Kaggle mirror)202229
CA CanadaStatistics Canada — First names at birth by sex at birth (Table 17-10-0147-01)199425
BR BrazilIBGE — Censo 2022 Nomes no Brasil per-token lookup (v3 API, given+surname)23#96,655
BR BrazilBrasil.IO genero-nomes (IBGE Censo 2010 mirror, CC-BY-SA)23#46,371
CA CanadaStatistics Canada — First names at birth by sex at birth (Table 17-10-0147-01)199120
CA CanadaStatistics Canada — First names at birth by sex at birth (Table 17-10-0147-01)199519

Reference works 2

  • Wikipedia given-name 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 · 414 rows in the corpus for this spelling.

Frequently asked questions

How common is the name Kym?
We estimate roughly 273 thousand people bear Kym (counting its spellings and scripts) across 10 countries in our records.
In which country does Kym have the most bearers?
Kym is most frequently recorded in South Korea, where it is most often spelled kim.
How common is Kym compared with other names?
In South Korea, Kym is the 5th most common surname of 14,083 surnames recorded there.
Is Kym a male or female name?
Kym is a female name in our records. Opposite-gender entries fall within the cross-gender noise we measure in the source data, so we don't report them as usage.
Query this name via API
curl https://api.mondonomo.ai/api/v1/name-graph/kym

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 . 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, “Kym” — the 5th most common surname in South Korea. Data snapshot 2026-09-12.

See how Kym parses inside a full name →