
How it is written
조 趙 Jo
Rank and people
Rank 6 in South Korea in the 2015 census: 1,453,971 people carry the surname in hangul, 2.93% of the Korean nationals counted.
Hanja spellings
The surname 조 can be written with more than one hanja.
趙 1,055,567 people write it with this hanja
- 趙 nimble, late-going
曺 398,260 people write it with this hanja
- 曺
調 78 people write it with this hanja
- 調 tune, tone, meter
造 33 people write it with this hanja
- 造 create, make, structure
朝 9 people write it with this hanja
- 朝 morning, dynasty, regimeKorean reading 조 · 12 strokes
Hanja meanings and Korean readings: KANJIDIC2.
Romanization and spellings
Revised Romanization: Jo. McCune-Reischauer: Cho. Other spellings: Joe, Joh, Jho, Jou, Zo
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The full list
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.