Jeong (surname)

Jeong (Jung)
Hangul
Hanja	, ,
Revised Romanization	Jeong
McCune–Reischauer	Chŏng

Jeong is a Latin alphabet rendition of the Korean family name "정", also often spelled Chung, Jung, or Cheong. As of the South Korean census of 2000, there were 2,230,611 people by this name in South Korea, or roughly 5% of the population.

In a study by the National Institute of the Korean Language based on a sample of year 2007 applications for South Korean passports, it was found that 48.6% of people with this surname chose to have it spelled in Latin letters as Jung in their passports. The Revised Romanization transcription Jeong was at second place with 37.0%, while Chung came in third at 9.2%. It was the only one out of the top five surnames (the others being Kim, Park, Lee, and Choi) for which the Revised Romanization spelling was used by more than a few percent of applicants.

Rarer alternative spellings (the remaining 5.2%) included, in order of decreasing frequency, Joung, Cheong, Chong, Jeoung, Jeung, Choung, Jong, Cheung, Juong, Jeng, Chyung, Jaung, Jueng, and Zheng. The spelling Jong, rare in South Korea, is official in North Korea's modified version of the McCune–Reischauer transcription system.

The Korean family name Jeong can be written with either of three homophonous hanja. Each of those three are broken down into a number of clans, identified by their bon-gwan (clan hometown, not necessarily the actual residence of the clan members), which indicate different lineages.

(나라 정 nara jeong) is the most common of the three Jeong names. This character was originally used to write the Chinese family name Zheng, and before that the name of a vassal state of the Zhou Dynasty. In the 2000 South Korean census, 2,010,117 people and 626,265 households had this family name. These people identified with 136 different bon-gwan (not including those listed as "other" or "unreported" in the census).

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