How it is written
이 李 I
Rank and people
Rank 2 in South Korea in the 2015 census: 7,307,237 people carry the surname in hangul, 14.70% of the Korean nationals counted.
Hanja spellings
The surname 이 can be written with more than one hanja.
李 7,306,844 people write it with this hanja
- 李 plumKorean reading 리 · 7 strokes
異 339 people write it with this hanja
- 異 uncommon, different, queerness
伊 23 people write it with this hanja
- 伊 Italy, that oneKorean reading 이 · 6 strokes
利 19 people write it with this hanja
- 利 profit, advantage, benefitKorean reading 리 · 7 strokes
怡 7 people write it with this hanja
- 怡 rejoice, enjoy
Hanja meanings and Korean readings: KANJIDIC2.
Romanization and spellings
Revised Romanization and McCune-Reischauer: I. Other spellings: Lee, Yi, Rhee, Yee, Rhie
Next in the ranking
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.