Korean Name Generator

Welcome to Reedsy’s ultimate bank of Korean names

A Korean name is a small world in and of itself: a one-syllable family name shared with millions, a two-syllable given name chosen with care, and — often invisibly — hanja characters underneath that carry the meaning. 

Our Korean name generator takes your character's gender, era, and story context and returns ten names with meanings and reasoning. Prefer to browse? The bank below holds seventy real Korean names — surnames, given names, and native Korean names — with hangul and meanings for each.

Inside the bank: 1,000,000+ Korean names with meanings

Korean names run family name first, given name second — Kim Min-jun, not Min-jun Kim — and there are no middle names: the two-syllable given name (Min-jun) is one name, though Western paperwork constantly misfiles the second syllable as a middle name.

Given names are usually two syllables, each traditionally chosen from hanja (Chinese characters), so the same spoken name can carry different meanings depending on the characters chosen. Many families also use a generational syllable (dollimja), and Korean women tend to keep their surnames at marriage. Since the 1980s, some parents have also skipped hanja entirely in favor of pure Korean words as names.

Common Korean surnames

Kim (김) alone accounts for roughly a fifth of South Koreans, and Kim, Lee, and Park together for almost half. What distinguishes families isn't the surname but the bon-gwan — the clan's ancestral seat: a Gimhae Kim and a Gyeongju Kim carry the same syllable but different lineages.

Best Korean girl names

Today's most popular girl names favor soft two-syllable combinations built on hanja for grace, beauty, and calm. Meanings below show common hanja choices: parents may pick different characters for the same sound.

Best Korean boy names

Boy names lean on hanja for talent, depth, and steadiness. As with the girls' table, the era column is craft information: Min-jun is a kindergartner, Chul-soo is a granddad, and swapping them says something on purpose.

How do I come up with a good Korean name?

Names are where most writers start — and where the work of characterization is actually just beginning. 

Here are a few things worth knowing as you write:

• Family name comes first. Korean names follow the order of family name, then given name. This matters in narration and dialogue, particularly in scenes where characters move between Korean and Western contexts. A character named Kim Jiwoo, for instance, is Kim (family name) Jiwoo (given name).
• Korean family names are few and common. Kim, Lee, and Park account for roughly half the South Korean population. This is worth knowing for two reasons: it's realistic for many characters to share surnames, and a character with an unusual family name is signaling something about their background.
• Hanja meaning is central to the name's identity. The same sound can be written with different hanja, producing different meanings. Jiwoo written as 지우 with characters meaning "wisdom and rain" is a different name, culturally speaking, than Jiwoo written to mean "paper friend." If meaning matters to your character, pay attention to the hanja the generator surfaces.
• Generational naming trends are trackable. Names popular among Koreans born in the 1950s and 60s carry a distinctly different flavor from those chosen in the 1990s or today. Contemporary Korean naming has trended toward softer, more gender-neutral sounds — a shift that's worth reflecting if your character is young!
• Read the literature, and watch the culture. Han Kang, Cho Nam-Joo, Kyung-Sook Shin, and the wave of contemporary Korean fiction in translation will show you how names function in Korean storytelling. Korean cinema and television have also produced some of the most carefully drawn characters in contemporary popular culture. 

A note on our use of AI

We built this tool for writers, which means we thought carefully about what AI should and shouldn't do here. The generator uses AI to produce names that better fit your character's specific context and needs — archetype, personality, genre, world — while explaining its reasoning for each one.

Here’s what it won’t do for you: it won’t write your story, name your character, or make creative decisions for you. It simply generates options for you.

More importantly, your inputs are not (and will never be) used to train any AI models. Treat whatever comes out as raw material: a starting point that belongs entirely to you. Every result is yours!