Wŏn
surname · Latin script
Wŏn is a surname written in the Latin script, with more bearers in South Korea than in any other country, where it is the 46th most common surname. Recorded meaning: * Past participle of win, from Old English winnan.
- USUnited States1 in 77K(measured from records)
- KRSouth Korea1 in 398as 원
- KPNorth Korea≈1 in 2.6K
carrying the name, as counted by its national register where one exists and as Mondonomo estimates it elsewhere (marked ≈ and "est." on hover). Where a country counts another spelling of the name rather than Wŏn itself, the figure is that spelling’s, and it is named. One hue, darker where it is more common; hover a country for its figure.
- South Korea (measured from records)
- 2 (measured from records)
- Record sources
- 266 (measured from records)
- ≈1 in 2.6K (inferred from the name graph)
130,174 named 원, 2015
recorded for this name
corpus datasets behind its best-documented spelling
strongest: highest-authority source
North Korea, est.
measured from records inferred from the name graph
Spellings & scripts
(measured from records)Locally spelled Won in US United States, NL Netherlands, MY Malaysia and 2 more, 원 in KR South Korea and Weon in CA Canada.
Spellings marked ● are how people bearing the name write it in our records, and ○ marks a model's transliteration; click a spelling to open its page.
Meaning & origin
(measured from records)* Past participle of win, from Old English winnan.
Cited for this meaning 1
Attested across 19 languages in the etymology graph.
Where in the world
(measured from records)Wŏn counted together with the spellings and other-language forms grouped with it. Where a register counted another spelling, the row names it.
Sorted by bearers: national registers' counts, and Mondonomo's estimates (≈, est.) where no register counts.
| Country | Most common spelling | Sources | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| KR South Korea | #46 | 130,174as 원 | 1 in 398 | 139K | 원 | 205 |
| KP North Korea | — | ≈9,800 est. | ≈1 in 2.6K | 2 | Won | 51 |
| US United States | — | 4,309 | 1 in 77K | 4.5K | Won | 266 |
| PK Pakistan | — | ≈3,900 est. | ≈1 in 60K | — | Won | 2 |
| ET Ethiopia | — | ≈1,700 est. | ≈1 in 62K | 1 | — | 3 |
| MY Malaysia | — | ≈1,700 est. | ≈1 in 19K | — | Won | 26 |
| CA Canada | — | ≈860 est. | ≈1 in 44K | — | Weon | 33 |
| NL Netherlands | — | ≈490 est. | ≈1 in 35K | — | Won | 12 |
130,174 people counted by KOSIS 2015 Census — surname population with hanja variants, 2015. Exact figures are national registers' own counts, while figures marked ≈ and est. are Mondonomo’s estimates, counted from our sources and calibrated against those registers; hover one for how far to trust it in that country. A dash means neither exists.
Registers cited: KOSIS 2015 Census — surname population with hanja variants; KOSIS — 2015 census surnames; Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2010; Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2020; Wikidata humans by citizenship — given & family names; Students of the World is a platform providing cultural insights since 1995.. Figures without a register are Mondonomo estimates; see Methodology.
Country figures for a list of names, at full precision, are available under licence rather than by scraping this table (how that works).
Notable people with this name
(measured from records)- Won Mi-kyungb. 1960KRSouth Korean actress (born 1960)
- Won In-choulb. 1961KRSouth Korean air force general
- Won Sin-yeonb. 1969KRSouth Korean film director
- Won Binb. 1977KRSouth Korean actor, model
- Won Tae Heeb. 1978KRSouth Korean actor
- Won Yun-jongb. 1985KRSouth Korean bobsledder
- Won Ok-Imb. 1986KPNorth Korean judoka
- Won Jin-ahb. 1991KRSouth Korean actress
- Won Du-jaeb. 1997KRSouth Korean association football player
- Won Ji-anb. 1999KRSouth Korean actress (born 1999)
The ten people covered by the most Wikipedia language editions — a proxy for cross-cultural notability, which favours historical and Western figures over equally prominent contemporary ones — shown by birth year. Source: Wikidata (CC0).
Evidence
(measured from records)No register attests this spelling yet
Frequently asked questions
- What does the name Wŏn mean, and where does it come from?
- * Past participle of win, from Old English winnan. Recorded by Wiktionary.
- In which country does Wŏn have the most bearers?
- In South Korea, the national register counted about 130 thousand people named 원, more than in any other country we hold.
- How common is the name Wŏn?
- In the United States, the national register counted 4,309 people named Wŏn in 2010, about 1 in 77 thousand residents.
- How common is Wŏn compared with other names?
- In South Korea, Wŏn is the 46th most common surname of 14,133 surnames recorded there.
What do you want to know about Wŏn?
Nobody replies to these one by one, but what readers ask decides what these pages answer next.
Query this name via API
curl -H "X-API-Key: YOUR_KEY" https://api.mondonomo.ai/api/v1/name-graph/w%C5%8FnThe payload this page is built from: spellings and scripts, countries and languages, related names, and the registers that attest the form. It takes a free API key (1,000 requests a day), which returns what this page shows everyone; the full country table, every register citation and the year-by-year series come with a licensed key, as does bulk access.
About this data
measured from records inferred from the name graph machine-generated
These figures come from the data snapshot of and will change as it is rebuilt.
Statistics are aggregated from the Mondonomo name corpus; related names and etymology are inferred from the name graph; pronunciation and any machine-marked transliterations are model-generated. Read how the numbers are made, including their known failure modes, and where the data comes from.
Reference works we consult — surname dictionaries, official name registers, Wikidata and Wiktionary — are named directly, beside the claims they support. The per-country source counts also include datasets of person records: we publish how many there are and their authority tier, but not their names.
Cite this page Mondonomo, “Wŏn” — the 46th most common surname in South Korea. Data snapshot 2026-10-13.