Lee (Korean Name)

Lee (Korean Name)

Lee is the typical romanization of the common South Korean surname I ( 이) and North Korean surname Ri (리). It is the second-most-common surname in Korea, behind only Kim.

The name is derived from the very common Chinese surname Li (Chinese: 李, Lǐ, "plum") and is written identically to the Chinese in Hanja characters. In South Korean, the modern pronunciation is like the English letter "E" (IPA: ) and it is therefore sometimes romanized as Yi, particularly when it is used as a given name. The traditional pronunciation – still employed in North Korean – was similar to the English surname "Lee" (IPA: ), although Korean tends to shift the phoneme l to r at the beginning of words, leading to the pronunciation /riː/, which produces the occasional romanizations Rhee, Rhie, and Ri.