Names of South Korea KR

Surnames in South Korea are inherited, but drawn from a stock small enough that a few cover much of the population; KOSIS 2015 Census — surname population with hanja variants records 김 as the commonest surname in South Korea.

Written in Korean.

Population
52M
Official registers
8
Name forms recorded
32K
ABuilt from 8 official registers (2025), 32,326 name forms in our corpus, 4 cited works.

Official registers for given names and surnames, 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.

How names work in South Korea

Names in South 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 South Korea

Counts children born in the year · authority tier 2
Supreme Court — newborn given names, 2026 — 100 given names counted over children born that year, girls only, as the register publishes them.
#NameBearers recordedOur rank
1서윤54144
2하린405—
3서아378—
4하윤37567
5이서365—
6아윤355—
7지안345—
8아린319—
9지유280—
10윤서27550
11시아251—
12도아235—
12예린235—
14지우234—
15수아233—
16유주232—
17이솔231—
18지아22455
19채이222—
20윤슬217—

Where the two lists disagree

25 of Supreme Court — newborn given names's top 25 given names sit five or more places away in our record corpus. Neither ranking is wrong; they count different people.

Supreme Court — newborn given names 2025Across all records서아: 1 → not ranked · not in our corpus’s top ranks for this country1. 서아not ranked서윤: 2 → 44 · ranks lower across all records2. 서윤44이서: 3 → not ranked · not in our corpus’s top ranks for this country3. 이서not ranked하린: 4 → not ranked · not in our corpus’s top ranks for this country4. 하린not ranked하윤: 5 → 67 · ranks lower across all records5. 하윤67아린: 6 → not ranked · not in our corpus’s top ranks for this country6. 아린not ranked지안: 7 → not ranked · not in our corpus’s top ranks for this country7. 지안not ranked아윤: 8 → not ranked · not in our corpus’s top ranks for this country8. 아윤not ranked지유: 9 → not ranked · not in our corpus’s top ranks for this country9. 지유not ranked시아: 10 → not ranked · not in our corpus’s top ranks for this country10. 시아not ranked윤서: 11 → 50 · ranks lower across all records11. 윤서50지아: 12 → 55 · ranks lower across all records12. 지아55지우: 13 → not ranked · not in our corpus’s top ranks for this country13. 지우not ranked채이: 14 → not ranked · not in our corpus’s top ranks for this country14. 채이not ranked도아: 15 → not ranked · not in our corpus’s top ranks for this country15. 도아not ranked유나: 16 → 60 · ranks lower across all records16. 유나60수아: 17 → not ranked · not in our corpus’s top ranks for this country17. 수아not ranked채아: 18 → not ranked · not in our corpus’s top ranks for this country18. 채아not ranked이솔: 19 → not ranked · not in our corpus’s top ranks for this country19. 이솔not ranked예린: 20 → not ranked · not in our corpus’s top ranks for this country20. 예린not ranked서하: 21 → not ranked · not in our corpus’s top ranks for this country21. 서하not ranked유하: 22 → not ranked · not in our corpus’s top ranks for this country22. 유하not ranked윤슬: 23 → not ranked · not in our corpus’s top ranks for this country23. 윤슬not ranked유주: 24 → not ranked · not in our corpus’s top ranks for this country24. 유주not ranked재이: 25 → not ranked · not in our corpus’s top ranks for this country25. 재이not ranked
Hover a line for what is available to explain that row.
Supreme Court — newborn given names, 2025 on the left; every record we hold for South Korea on the right. A dashed line means the name is not in our top ranks for this country at all.

The register counts one population in one year — everyone it enumerates, once. Our corpus counts records: historical registers going back decades, the diaspora, business and place records, and several generations of births. A name that was common two generations ago outranks a name common today; a name whose spelling scatters across sources (diacritics dropped, transliterated differently) loses ground, because only its dominant spelling is ranked.

Characteristic of South Korea

Not the most common names — the most distinctive ones. A name appears here when South 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.

서준지연하준민준도윤수연지훈정호지호서현혜진준호지은지영수진시우예준승현현상훈주영하은도현지현윤서소영정현민서지혜성민서윤주원성희수현지후성준성훈성호현정현주은영하윤은정현우은주정훈은경민정진영미경선희정민선영재영영주민지영진성진정희지아
Sized by how much of the difference between South Korea's name distribution and the world's this name accounts for. Hover for its share here against its share worldwide.●

Over time

서윤서연지우하윤서현200820262,896
Supreme Court — newborn given names, 2008–2026 (19 years). The line is that register's own figure for each year — not a total across registers, which would count the same people twice. The publisher labels this series “flow”.

Up to five names at a time.

Scripts & spelling

Names in South Korea are written in Hangul (87%) and Latin (13%), measured over the spellings our corpus records for this country.

김surname●Kim
이surname●
박surname●Park
최surname●Choe
Kimsurname●
The best-attested names in South 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

  • KOSIS 2015 Census — surname population with hanja variants2015headline (surnames)

    Statistics Korea (KOSTAT) via KOSIS. Counts: residents. surname. 191 forms. 2015. Licence: Open data.

    What we know about this register

    2015 Population & Housing Census table DT_1IN15SD, '성씨·본관별 인구(5인 이상) - 전국' (population by surname and bon-gwan, 5 or more persons, nationwide). Published threshold is >= 5 persons, so list_coverage is partial; unlike the US file there is no aggregate row for the residual, so the below-threshold tail cannot be quantified. Raw CSV cached at data/name_books/acquisitions_20260712/kr_kosis_surnames/. 192 Hangul surnames aggregated from 533 hanja-qualified census entries, summing EXACTLY to the published national total of 49,705,663 — the reconciliation that validates the ingest. Hanja homographs are summed because 'how many people have the surname 가' is 가(價)=14 plus 가(賈)=9,936; each variant and its own count survive in data_note as hanja=價:14|賈:9936, so the split is recoverable without a second row (two rows would collide under the combined build's dedupe key). CROSS-LINKED from the dict layer (data/normalized/dict__kr-kosis-surnames/attestations.parquet), which held this at full granularity while the official layer showed none of it. Distinct from kr-kosis-2015, a 100-row McCune-Reischauer ROMANIZED top-100 stub, and from kr-sgis-surnames (SGIS service, 11,178 surnames). Builder scripts/build_kr_kosis_surname_clans.py.

    Last verified 2026-07-30.

  • Supreme Court — newborn given names2026headline (given)

    Supreme Court of Korea, electronic family registration (via baby-name.kr). Counts: newborns. given. 100 forms. 2008–2026.

    What we know about this register

    Auto-backfilled registry stub (2026-06-05); verify publisher/URL. 3,800 rows, name_types=['given'], evidence=['count']. source note: Supreme Court electronic family registration; aggregated via baby-name

    Last verified 2026-06-05.

  • KOSIS — 2015 census surnames2015

    Statistics Korea (KOSIS). Counts: residents. surname. 69 forms. 2015.

    What we know about this register

    100-row top-100 Korean surname list in McCune-Reischauer ROMANIZATION (Kim, I, Pak, Chong, Choe ...), counts summing to 51,527,244. Previously an auto-backfilled stub with no data_url. SUPERSEDED for most purposes by kr-kosis-surnames-hanja (192 Hangul surnames reconciling exactly to the 2015 census total of 49,705,663) and kr-kosis-surname-clans (13,048 surname x bon-gwan pairs) — retained because it is the only romanized KR surname list held, which is useful for matching Latin-script sources. Its 51.5M total does not match the 2015 census 49.7M, so its provenance is not fully established; treat the counts as approximate.

    Last verified 2026-07-30.

  • SGIS — 성씨 통계 (surname population statistics)2015

    Statistics Korea (KOSTAT) — SGIS / Population & Housing Census. Counts: not recorded. surname. 44 forms. 2015. Licence: KOSTAT open statistics.

    What we know about this register

    Per-surname population from the SGIS family-name statistics service, backed by the Population & Housing Census. Accessed via sgis.mods.go.kr (canonical sgis.kostat.go.kr TLS-resets non-KR clients). Two-step JSON flow: step1 fmSearchAjax.do (search_gubun=1, bs_code=<hangul>) resolves the canonical hanja-clan key(s) e.g. 김(金), a single Hangul surname mapping to multiple clans (정 -> 丁 and 鄭) which are summed; step2 familyAjax.do (gubun=1, bs_code=<key>, bs_year=2015/2000/1985) returns per-sigungu population, SUM = national total. count = 2015 national sum, data_note sgis_surname_census_2015. 44 rows. EXHAUSTED — PROVEN 2026-07-30, and NOT seed-limited as the earlier note implied. The queryable domain is finite because SGIS resolves only SINGLE-syllable surnames (the genuine compound surnames 남궁/황보/제갈/선우/독고 all return zero clans), so the entire Hangul syllables block U+AC00..U+D7A3 was swept — 11,172 candidates, one step1 request each since step1 alone decides existence. Result: exactly the SAME 44 surnames the previous 255-candidate seed found. SGIS is therefore a TOP-N tool, not an enumerable oracle: it attests approximately the top 44 surnames by bearer count and nothing below (원, 72,032 bearers, resolves; 변, 75,809, does not), and it files the 柳 clan under 유 so 류 never resolves despite 101,867 bearers. Verified single-threaded with warmed sessions and retries, so the absences are real and not the unwarmed-session false-negative failure this collector guards against. No larger seed can ever raise this figure. KR surname breadth beyond these 44 is NOT available from an official publication; the 865-surname roster aggregate was dropped 2026-07-31 as non-citable (see mondodb). (historic note: it held 865 surnames including all five compounds). scripts/kr_sgis_collect.py sweep.

    Last verified 2026-07-30.

  • This page discusses popular baby names in Canada for the year 2024, published by Statistics Canada.2024not a population count

    www150.statcan.gc.ca. Counts: not recorded. given. 10 forms. 2024. Licence: unknown.

    What we know about this register

    Auto-discovered via Firecrawl. This page discusses popular baby names in Canada for the year 2024, published by Statistics Canada.

    Last verified 2026-05-11.

  • This page provides statistics on popular baby names in South Korea based on official data from the Electronic Family Rel2026not a population count

    baby-name.kr. Counts: newborns. given. 10 forms. 2026. Licence: unknown.

    What we know about this register

    Auto-discovered via Firecrawl. This page provides statistics on popular baby names in South Korea based on official data from the Electronic Family Relations System.

    Last verified 2026-05-11.

  • This page lists the most popular baby names in South Korea for 2025 as published by Haps Magazine Korea.2025not a population count

    korea.stripes.com. Counts: not recorded. given. 10 forms. 2025. Licence: unknown.

    What we know about this register

    Auto-discovered via Firecrawl. Stars and Stripes (US military newspaper for Korea) republication of Haps Magazine Korea baby name list; 20-row parquet has counts [439, 419, 417, 382, 380] — implausibly small for national data (South Korea has ~250K births/year; top name should be 1000+). Better source: kr-kosis-baby-names.

    Last verified 2026-05-12.

  • The page lists the most popular baby boy names in South Korea as of October 2024, published by Statista.2024not a population count

    www.statista.com. Counts: not recorded. given. 3 forms. 2024. Licence: unknown.

    What we know about this register

    Auto-discovered via Firecrawl. The page lists the most popular baby boy names in South Korea as of October 2024, published by Statista.

    Last verified 2026-05-11.

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.

Questions

What is the most common given name in South Korea?
서아, according to Supreme Court — newborn given names (2025), with 1,823 bearers recorded among girls.
What is the most common surname in South Korea?
김, according to KOSIS 2015 Census — surname population with hanja variants (2015), with 10,689,967 bearers recorded.
Why do sources disagree about the commonest name in South Korea?
Because they count different people. Supreme Court — newborn given names (2025) counts one population once, and its commonest given name is 서아. Our corpus counts every record we hold — historical registers, the diaspora, decades of births — and its commonest is 지연. Both are on this page, each with its denominator.

Cite this page: Mondonomo, “Names of South Korea”, https://nelma.mondonomo.ai/names/KR (data snapshot 2026-09-12). Official figures from KOSIS 2015 Census — surname population with hanja variants; Supreme Court — newborn given names.