Hwai
given name · Latin script
Meaning: Alternative form of Huai (“Chinese river”)
Recorded for both men and women· direction only, no split published
Hwai is a given name written in the Latin script, with more bearers in South Korea than in any other country.
- KRSouth Korea≈1 in 30Kas 화(inferred from the name graph)
- USUnited States1 in 264Kas Hwa
- SESweden1 in 88Kas Hwa
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 Hwai 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 (inferred from the name graph)
- 2 (measured from records)
- Sources
- 149 (measured from records)
- ≈1 in 30K (inferred from the name graph)
≈1,700 named 화, est.
recorded for this name
Highest-authority source
South Korea, est., as 화
measured from records inferred from the name graph
Spellings & scripts(measured from records)
Locally spelled Hwa in US United States, KR South Korea, NL Netherlands and 1 more.
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)
Alternative form of Huai (“Chinese river”).
Sources 1
- kaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations)
Where in the world(measured from records)
Hwai 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 | — | ≈1,700 est. | ≈1 in 30K | 915 | Hwa | 136 |
| US United States | — | 1,258as Hwa | 1 in 264K | 1.1K | Hwa | 149 |
| SE Sweden | — | 116as Hwa | 1 in 88K | 116 | — | 1 |
| NL Netherlands | — | 57as Hwa | 1 in 303K | 45 | Hwa | 4 |
| DK Denmark | — | 6as Hwa | 1 in 978K | 6 | — | — |
| KP North Korea | #229 | — | — | 1 | Hwa | 32 |
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: Census Bureau — First Name Frequency 2020 by sex; KOSIS 2015 Census — surname population with hanja variants; Meertens NVB — Nederlandse Voornamenbank (all-time BRP bearer counts, 2018); Skatteverket — Sök hur många som har ett visst namn (living population); Wikidata humans by citizenship — given & family names; Danmarks Statistik — Hvor mange hedder...? (living-population name counts). 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).
Other recorded senses(measured from records)
Hwai is also recorded in one other lexicon, as a different name or as an ordinary word. These are senses of the spelling, not of the name above.
In Shona, sheep
as a wordkaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations)
Ordered by how much of this spelling's record each language holds, so a sense from a language the name is barely used in sits last rather than first.
Evidence(measured from records)
No register attests this spelling yet
Frequently asked questions
- What does the name Hwai mean, and where does it come from?
- Alternative form of Huai (“Chinese river”). Recorded by kaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations).
- Is Hwai a male or female name?
- Hwai is recorded for both men and women. We don't publish a percentage split: a record's gender belongs to the person and is attached to every given name on that record, so names in cultures where a name string also carries a parent's or spouse's given name pick up large cross-gender counts.
- In which country does Hwai have the most bearers?
- Mondonomo estimates about 1.7 thousand people named 화 in South Korea, more than in any other country we hold.
- How common is the name Hwai?
- In the United States, the national register counted 1,258 people named Hwa in 2020, about 1 in 264 thousand residents.
- How common is Hwai compared with other names?
- In North Korea, Hwai is the 229th most common given name of 2,746 given names recorded there.
What do you want to know about Hwai?
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/hwaiThe 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, “Hwai” — the 229th most common given name in North Korea. Data snapshot 2026-10-10.