계
surname · Hangul script
Meaning: kye, a Korean rotating savings and credit association
Recorded as a male name· opposite-gender records fall within measured source noise
/ke̞/(machine-generated) pronunciation, model-generated
계 is a surname written in the Hangul script, with more bearers in the United States than in any other country.
- KRSouth Korea1 in 7.8K(measured from records)
- USUnited States1 in 14Kas Kay
- DKDenmark1 in 31Kas Kay
carrying the name, as counted by each country's national register. Where a country counts another spelling of the name rather than 계 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.
- United States (measured from records)
- 2 (measured from records)
- Sources
- 109 (measured from records)
- 1 in 7.8K (inferred from the name graph)
24,337 named Kay, 2010
recorded for this name
Highest-authority source
South Korea
measured from records inferred from the name graph
Spellings & scripts(measured from records)
Locally spelled Kay in US United States.
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)
kye, a Korean rotating savings and credit association
Sources 1
- kaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations)
Attested across 6 languages in the etymology graph.
Where in the world(measured from records)
계 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 | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| US United States | — | 24,337as Kay | 1 in 14K | 75K | Kay | 109 |
| KR South Korea | #105 | 6,641 | 1 in 7.8K | 7.3K | 계 | 70 |
| IN India | — | 5,181as Kay | 1 in 256K | 5.2K | — | 8 |
| DK Denmark | — | 189as Kay | 1 in 31K | 2K | — | — |
| ES Spain | — | 173as Kay | 1 in 289K | 3.2K | — | 2 |
| NO Norway | — | 116as Kay | 1 in 47K | 12K | — | 4 |
| FI Finland | — | 56as Kay | 1 in 99K | 12K | — | 3 |
24,337 people counted by Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2010, 2010. 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 — Surname Frequency 2010; Census Bureau — First Name Frequency 2020 by sex; SSB — Navnesøk (name-search service, living population); DVV — Nimipalvelu (Finnish name service, per-name lookup); KOSIS 2015 Census — surname population with hanja variants; KOSIS — 2015 census surnames; Instate — India surnames (clean spellings) from electoral rolls; INE — Padrón per-token widgets (current living counts, given + apellidos); 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).
How to address them(machine-generated)
Evidence(measured from records)
Attested in 6 sources across 1 country.
Reference works 3
- KOSIS Korea 2015 census surnames + clans (bon'gwan)
- Wikipedia surname tokens
- Wikidata name items (native-script + romanized given/family names)
These works list the name; their figures are licensed and are not reproduced here.
Register rows as of the 2026-10-09 data build.
Frequently asked questions
- What does the name 계 mean, and where does it come from?
- kye, a Korean rotating savings and credit association Recorded by kaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations).
- How do you pronounce 계?
- A machine transcription gives /ke̞/ (IPA) for Korean.
- In which country does 계 have the most bearers?
- In the United States, the national register counted about 24 thousand people named Kay, more than in any other country we hold.
- Where is 계 most common?
- Measured as a share of residents rather than as a count, 계 is densest in South Korea — about 1 in 7.8 thousand people — even though United States holds more of our records for it.
- How common is the name 계?
- In South Korea, the national register counted 6,641 people named 계 in 2015, about 1 in 7.8 thousand residents.
- How common is 계 compared with other names?
- In South Korea, 계 is the 105th most common surname of 14,133 surnames recorded there.
What do you want to know about 계?
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/%EA%B3%84The 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, “계” — the 105th most common surname in South Korea. Data snapshot 2026-10-10.