By Chung Hyun-chae
Nearly 160,000 people each year apply to officially change their names, according to the Supreme Court, Sunday.
Requests to go through the legal process surged after 2005 when the court ruled that renaming is permissible unless people have ulterior motives such as trying to conceal a crime.
The number of requests increased from 72,833 in 2005 to 109,567 in 2006 and has remained around 160,000 a year on average, or 430 people per day.
Some 157,000 people applied for a name change in 2014, and more than 81,000 people did so in the first half of this year.
More than 95 percent were allowed to gain new names in recent years, while only about 70 percent were allowed to rename in the 1990s.
There are various reasons people have for wanting to change names.
Some do so because they are ridiculed for a name that is pronounced similar to funny words in Korean. Some want to change their names if it is the same as a notorious criminal.
As of June, the names most sought after by men wanting to change included Min-jun, followed by Hyeon-wu, Jeong-wu, Seo-jun and Do-hyeon. For women, Su-yeon was the most sought-after, followed by Ji-won, Seo-yeon, Seo-yeong and Seo-yun.