How it is written
최 崔 Choe
Rank and people
Rank 5 in South Korea in the 2015 census: 2,340,582 people carry the surname in hangul, 4.71% of the Korean nationals counted.
Hanja spellings
The surname 최 can be written with more than one hanja.
崔 2,333,927 people write it with this hanja
- 崔 cliff, bluff, precipice
催 6,582 people write it with this hanja
- 催 sponsor, hold (a meeting), give (a dinner)
最 24 people write it with this hanja
- 最 utmost, most, extreme
Hanja meanings and Korean readings: KANJIDIC2.
Romanization and spellings
Revised Romanization: Choe. McCune-Reischauer: Ch'oe. Other spellings: Choi, Choy, Che, Chai, Chae
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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.