Ji (Korean name)


Ji, also spelled Jee, Chi, or Chee, is a Korean family name, as well as a popular element in Korean given names. The meaning differs based on the hanja used to write it.

Family name

As a family name, Ji may be written with either of two hanja, one meaning "wisdom", and the other meaning "pond". Each has one bon-gwan: for the family name meaning "wisdom", Pongju Village, Pongsan County, North Hwanghae in what is today North Korea, and for the family name meaning "pond", Chungju, Chungcheongbuk-do in what is today South Korea. The 2000 South Korean census found 147,572 people with this family name.
In a study by the National Institute of the Korean Language based on 2007 application data for South Korean passports, it was found that 79.5% of people with this surname spelled it in Latin letters as Ji in their passports. Another 9.0% spelled it as Jee, and 8.5% as Chi. Rarer alternative spellings included Gi, Chee, Je, and Jy. For the Koryo-saram from the former Soviet Union, it was spelled as Ti.
Notable people with this family name include:

Ji

Others

Given name

There are 46 hanja with the reading "ji" on the South Korean government's official list of hanja which may be registered for use in given names. Some common ones are listed in the table at right. Many names containing this syllable have been popular throughout the late 20th and early 21st centuries, including:

As name element

Historically-popular given names formed with the syllable "ji" include:
;Masculine
;Feminine
Other names containing this syllable include:
;First syllable
;Second syllable

People

People with the single-syllable given name Ji include: