By Bae Ji-sook
Staff Reporter
One out of every five Koreans has the surname Kim and the top three surnames in the country make up nearly half of the total population.
According to government research on the population, the number of people named Kim reached 10.5 million, or 21.5 percent of the 50.1 million living in the country.
Coming after Kim were Lee and Park at 7.2 million won and 4.1 million, respectively. The combined number of Kims, Lees and Parks reached 22 million or 44.6 percent of the total population.
As of October this year, Chung, Choi, Cho, Kang, Chang, Yoon and Yoo took the next places. Lim, Shin, Han, Oh, Seo, Chun, Kwon, Hwang, Ahn and Song are also prevalent surnames.
The increase of Koreans' emigration increased these popular surnames in foreign countries, also.
According to a census conducted in the United States, 30 out of 100,000 people in the U.S. had the surname Park, the 343rd most popular in the country. The number of Chois also rose to 13 out of 100,000 being.
According to a census held in 2000, there were 287 surnames in Korea, but these were made up of 3,440 root sources. ``Taking into account that names with a different root do not consider each other as the same family, the classification of surnames is more complicated,'' a spokesman of the Ministry of Government Administration and Home Affairs said.