Convert Korean names to romanized English following the official Ministry of Culture (문화체육관광부) Revised Romanization rules. Perfect for passports, official documents, and profiles.
Get the correct English romanization of any Korean name
The Revised Romanization of Korean (국어의 로마자 표기법) was established in 2000 by the Ministry of Culture and Tourism of South Korea. It is the official system for transcribing Korean into the Latin alphabet and is used on road signs, passports, and official documents. The system is designed so that readers can approximate Korean pronunciation without prior knowledge of the language.
Korean passports follow the Revised Romanization system by default, but you may keep a conventional spelling (e.g., Lee, Park, Choi) if you have been using it abroad. Given names are typically written without a hyphen on passports.
The tool treats the first syllable as the surname and the remaining syllables as the given name — the standard Korean convention. Most Korean surnames are one syllable. For two-syllable surnames like 남궁 or 선우, you can enter just the surname to see its romanization separately.
Under the Revised Romanization, ㄹ is written 'r' when it is an initial consonant (e.g., 라 → ra) and 'l' when it is a final consonant/coda (e.g., 달 → dal). This reflects the phonetic difference between the two positions in Korean.
McCune-Reischauer (MR) was the official system before 2000 and is still used in North Korea and some academic contexts. MR uses apostrophes and breves (e.g., ŏ, ŭ), which are inconvenient in everyday digital use. The Revised system avoids diacritics and is the current South Korean standard.
Everything you need to know about converting Korean names to English spelling.
There are two main romanization traditions for Korean names. The official standard since 2000 is the Ministry of Culture Revised Romanization, but many Koreans abroad use older 'conventional' spellings that became fixed before the reform. For example, '이' is officially 'I' but 'Lee' is far more common; '박' is officially 'Bak' but 'Park' is universally recognized. Passport holders may keep their existing romanization.
For given names with two or more syllables, both 'Minsu' and 'Min-su' are acceptable. Passports typically omit the hyphen, while academic and formal documents sometimes include it. The hyphen can help prevent mispronunciation — for example, 'Minho' could be misread as 'Min-ho' or 'Mi-nho', so 'Min-ho' removes the ambiguity.