How it is written
천 千 Cheon
Rank and people
Rank 49 in South Korea in the 2015 census: 121,927 people carry the surname in hangul, 0.25% of the Korean nationals counted.
Hanja spellings
The surname 천 can be written with more than one hanja.
千 121,780 people write it with this hanja
- 千 thousandKorean reading 천 · 3 strokes
天 141 people write it with this hanja
- 天 heavens, sky, imperialKorean reading 천 · 4 strokes
川 6 people write it with this hanja
- 川 stream, river, river or three-stroke river radical (no. 47)
Hanja meanings and Korean readings: KANJIDIC2.
Romanization and spellings
Revised Romanization: Cheon. McCune-Reischauer: Ch'ŏn. Other spellings: Chun, Chon, Chen, Choun, Cheun
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Sources and credits
- Ranking, population and share: Statistics Korea, 2015 census, 성씨·본관별 인구(5인 이상) - 전국 (population by surname and clan, nationwide), KOSIS table DT_1IN15SD.
- Romanization and spellings: English Wikipedia, "List of Korean surnames", revision 1373629782, by its contributors, licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. Changes: table reformatted and joined with Statistics Korea and EDRDG data.
- Hanja meanings: KANJIDIC2 (version 2026-272) from the Electronic Dictionary Research and Development Group, licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. The EDRDG acknowledgement is at the foot of the page.
- Audio: synthetic speech from Google Cloud Text-to-Speech. See the about page.