Names of North Korea KP

The names that most distinguish North Korea from the rest of the world are Kim, Chol and Yong; in our record corpus the commonest names held in North Korea are James and Kim.

Written in Korean.

Population
26M
Official registers
1
Name forms recorded
1.1K
BBuilt from 1 official register, 1,063 name forms in our corpus, 4 cited works.

At least one official register, plus a written account of the naming system.

The account of the naming system rests on encyclopaedia and genealogy sources; it has not yet been checked against onomastic literature.

fewerlarger share
Where the names most characteristic of North Korea are borne outside it — the same spelling, counted in our record corpus. Shares are of all bearers of those names anywhere, North Korea included.

How names work in North Korea

Names in North Korea follow one naming tradition. Its structure, its given-name and surname stock, how to address someone and what trips software up are set out on its own page.

The most common names in North Korea

Characteristic of North Korea

Not the most common names — the most distinctive ones. A name appears here when North Korea holds a larger share of its bearers than the world does, weighted by how much of the country's whole name distribution it accounts for.

CholYongJamesKorea哲BettyJeanHyokKWang花RogerTammyKyongSungWayneDawnDouglas
Sized by how much of the difference between North Korea's name distribution and the world's this name accounts for. Hover for its share here against its share worldwide.●

Scripts & spelling

Names in North Korea are written in Latin (95%), Han (4%) and Hebrew (1%), measured over the spellings our corpus records for this country.

Kimsurname●
Jamesgiven name●
Cholgiven name●
Choesurname●
Johnsonsurname●
The best-attested names in North Korea, in the spelling our records use there. Where a Latin spelling is also attested it is shown beneath — a spelling from the corpus, not a machine romanisation.

Countries whose names look alike

Measured as the overlap between each country's top 300 given-name forms, weighted by how common each is — the fuzzy-set approach of Lauc (2024), on a truncated inventory.

Registers & sources

Official registers

  • Wikidata humans by citizenship — given & family namesnot a population count

    Wikidata / Wikimedia Foundation. Counts: notable people. given and surname. 664 forms. Licence: CC0.

    What we know about this register

    Top-N given names + surnames among Wikidata persons with P27=Q423. Snapshot 2026-05-19. N given: 670, N surnames: 110. Heavy notability bias — diaspora/leadership over-represented; use as low-confidence enrichment only. CHECKED 2026-08-06: sanity-checked for any DPRK statistics/civil-registry web presence with a name-lookup shape — the Central Bureau of Statistics has no confirmed independent site, and naenara.com.kp is a general government portal with no such function. Confirmed dead end as expected for North Korea; no further route to pursue here.

    Last verified 2026-05-19.

Cited works

Behind this page's own account — its one-line answer, its explanation of why the rankings differ, and the notes on its registers. Each naming tradition cites its own sources on its page. Not yet checked against onomastic literature.

About this data

Official figures are reproduced from the register named beside them, at the year named beside them, and are never combined across registers. The "across all records" ranking counts records in our own corpus — historical registers, the diaspora, business and place records — and is not a population count. Bearer estimates are omitted where a name accounts for more than a quarter of a country's records, because the estimate is not defensible there. Names listed by reference works and licensed name dictionaries are cited as attesting a name; their figures are not published.

Data snapshot: 2026-09-12.

Cite this page: Mondonomo, “Names of North Korea”, https://nelma.mondonomo.ai/names/KP (data snapshot 2026-09-12).