Lee (Korean surname)

Lee, I, or Yi (Korean: 이; 리) is the second-most-common surname in Korea, behind Kim (김). As of the South Korean census of 2015, there were 7,306,828 people by this name in South Korea or 14.7% of the population.

Historically, 李 was written as Ni (니) in Korea. The spelling formally changed to I (이) in 1933 when the initial sound rule (두음 법칙) was established. In the McCune–Reischauer romanization of North Korea, it is romanized as Ri (리) because there is no distinction between the alveolarliquids /l/ and /r/ in modern Korean.