Korean Name Generator

Korean names run surname first and are almost always three syllables: a one-syllable family name and a two-syllable given name. Kim Ji-woo is family Kim, given Ji-woo. There is no middle name — the hyphen in Ji-woo joins two halves of one name, and Ji is not a separate unit.

The surname pool is even smaller than China's. Kim, Lee and Park alone cover close to half the population of South Korea, and about 250 surnames cover essentially all of it. Because so many people share a surname, Koreans traditionally identify by bon-gwan, the ancestral seat: the Gimhae Kim are a different lineage from the Gyeongju Kim, even though both are simply "Kim" in writing.

Most given names are written in hangul but composed from hanja — Chinese characters — chosen for their meaning. 지우 can be 智友, "wisdom and friendship", or 智雨, "wise rain", or a dozen other pairs, and the parents pick. So a Korean given name has a meaning, but the meaning lives in a hanja writing that never appears on a business card. Legal registration limits the choice to an approved hanja list, in the same spirit as Japan's jinmeiyō set.

Many families keep a dollimja, a generation syllable: one of the two given-name syllables is fixed for every child of that generation in the lineage, cycling through the five elements. Brothers and male cousins therefore share half a name, and it is common to be able to place a relative's generation from the name alone.

Romanisation is the practical trap. Korea has used at least three systems, and family names are exempt from all of them in practice: 이 is written Lee, Yi, Rhee and Li by different families of the same name; 박 is Park, Bak or Pak; 최 is Choi or Choe. Whatever a family wrote on its first passport, it keeps. Hyphenation is equally unsettled — Ji-woo, Jiwoo and Ji Woo are all in use.

Finally, women do not take a husband's surname on marriage. A married couple in Korea normally have two different surnames, and the children take the father's.