Kwon
surname · Latin script
Meaning: 3. Chinese W: variant of Guan 2 (Dictionary of American Family Names)
(measured from records)Officially recorded in 17 countries · latest register: Census Bureau, 2020
Kwon is a surname written in the Latin script, with more bearers in North Korea than in any other country, where it is the 57th most common surname. Kwon is also written 권혁화 in Korean (Hangul).
- KPNorth Korea≈1 in 110few records(inferred from the name graph)
- KRSouth Korea≈1 in 4.8K
- CACanada≈1 in 23K
carrying the name, as counted by its national register where one exists and as Mondonomo estimates it elsewhere (marked ≈ and "est." on hover). Countries with no figure are shown too: flat where a national register lists the name without counting it, hatched where only our records hold it. One hue, darker where it is more common; hover a country for its figure.
- North Korea (inferred from the name graph)
- 2 (measured from records)
- Record sources
- 386 (measured from records)
- ≈1 in 109 (inferred from the name graph)
≈240,000 people, est.
recorded for this name
corpus datasets behind its best-documented spelling
strongest: highest-authority source
North Korea, est.
measured from records inferred from the name graph
Kwon in other scripts: Korean (Hangul)
(measured from records)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)3. Chinese W: variant of Guan 2.
Cited for this meaning 1
- Dictionary of American Family Names
Attested across 2 languages in the etymology graph.
Where the surname Kwon is found
(measured from records)Kwon 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 | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| KP North Korea | #57 | ≈240,000 est. | ≈1 in 109 | 5 | Kwon | 29 |
| US United States | — | 13,235 | 1 in 25K | 14K | Kwon | 386 |
| KR South Korea | #71 | ≈11,000 est. | ≈1 in 4.8K | 720K | Kwon | 227 |
| CA Canada | — | ≈1,800 est. | ≈1 in 23K | — | Kwon | 147 |
| AU Australia | — | ≈1,100 est. | ≈1 in 24K | — | Kwon | 137 |
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: KOSIS — 2015 census surnames; Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2010; Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2020; Wikidata humans by citizenship — given & family names. 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)Kwon 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.
Chinese variant of Guan
as a nameDictionary of American Family Names
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.
Notable people with this name
(measured from records)- Ke Huy Quanb. 1971USnot in their usual nameAmerican actor and stunt choreographer
- Michelle Kwanb. 1980USnot in their usual nameAmerican figure skater and diplomat
- BoAb. 1986KRnot in their usual nameSouth Korean singer, actress and songwriter
The ten people covered by the most Wikipedia language editions — a proxy for cross-cultural notability, which favours historical and Western figures over equally prominent contemporary ones — shown by birth year. Source: Wikidata (CC0).
How to address them
(machine-generated)Evidence
(measured from records)28 registers and reference works attest this spelling, across 17 countries.
Register rows as of the 2026-10-09 data build.
Frequently asked questions
- What does the name Kwon mean, and where does it come from?
- 3. Chinese W: variant of Guan 2. Recorded by Dictionary of American Family Names.
- Which countries have the most people with the surname Kwon?
- Mondonomo estimates about 242 thousand people named Kwon in North Korea, more than in any other country we hold, where it is most often spelled kwon. After it come United States, South Korea, Canada and Australia; the country table on this page ranks them.
- How common is the name Kwon?
- In the United States, the national register counted 13,235 people named Kwon in 2010, about 1 in 25 thousand residents.
- How common is Kwon compared with other names?
- In North Korea, Kwon is the 57th most common surname of 2,439 surnames recorded there.
What do you want to know about Kwon?
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/kwonThe 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, “Kwon” — ranked 37th in North Korea (Wikidata humans by citizenship). Data snapshot 2026-10-13.