Name Standards

While the Korean language has a very standardized system for Romanization, this is not true when it comes to personal names. Individuals have a large amount of flexibility with the official Romanization of their names in passports and business cards. This explains why 이 is usually written Lee and not I, 김 is usually Kim and not Gim, and 박 is usually Park and not Bak. Speaking of family names, one cultural note worth mentioning is that women keep their maiden name after they get married, which is why you might meet a Mr. Park and his wife Mrs. Kim.

Given names also have a range of possibilities. A general name in Korean is 홍길동, and is used much like John Doe, John Smith, or Jane Doe in English. Using 홍길동 as an example, let’s look at the given name of 길동, which can be written as:

Gildong

Gil Dong

Gil-dong

Gil-Dong

In 2013, the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism has recommended people use the first format; no space and no dash but a dash is allowed in order to distinguish syllables. This means Gildong is the best and Gil-dong is also allowed. The Ministry also recommends placing the family name first, as is per the norm in Asian languages. However, as people have freedom to write their name as they want, you will see a wide variety of formats used, sometimes by the same person. It isn’t abnormal to see, for example, Hong Gildong on a business card, Gildong Hong on a resume, and then Hong Gil Dong on a website. This means using the terms “first name” and “last name” is not recommended, but saying “given name” and “family name” will be more accurate. To aid in knowing what is the family name versus the given name, for press releases and other news articles we at IBS frequently write the family name in full capital letters for the first time it is used in the body of the contents.

There is not much variety of Korean family names. Roughly half of people living in South Korea have the family name Kim, Lee, or Park. These are so common names that some English language publications will erroneously mention a South Korean saying where if someone goes up to Nam Mountain (Namsan) in Seoul and throws a stone, they are bound to hit someone with the name Kim, Lee, or Park (서울 남산에서 돌을 던지면 김씨, 이씨, 박씨 성을 가진 사람이 그 돌을 맞는다라는 말이 있다. 이처럼 한국에는 김씨, 이씨, 박씨, 최씨 등의 성이 다수를 차지하 고 있다.). This is not a popular joke nor even a saying, but was used as an allegory on a single website to demonstrate how common those names are and has been picked up by English language media over the years.

The ten most common family names in Korea are Kim, Lee, Park, Jeong (Chung), Choi (Choe), Cho, Kang (Gang), Chang (Jang), Yoon, and Lim (Rim).