Koh (surname)

Koh may be a spelling of a number of Chinese surnames, listed below by their spelling in Hanyu Pinyin, which reflects the Standard Mandarin pronunciation:[1]

• Xǔ (許/许), spelled Koh based on its pronunciation in various Southern Min dialects. The surname is frequently spelled this way in Malaysia and Singapore, where many descendants of Chinese migrants can trace their roots to Southern Min-speaking areas of China, namely Fujian and eastern Guangdong.[2] Other spellings of the Southern Min pronunciation include Co, Ko, and Kho.
• Gāo (高), spelled Koh based on its Cantonese pronunciation
• Gù (顧/顾), spelled Koh based on its pronunciation in various Southern Min dialects
• Gū (辜), spelled Koh based on its pronunciation in various Southern Min dialects
• Gŭ (古), spelled Koh based on its pronunciation in various Southern Min dialects
• Ke (柯), spelled Koh based on its pronunciation in multiple varieties of Chinese including Hakka and Southern Min
• Kòu (寇), spelled Koh based on its pronunciation in multiple varieties of Chinese including Mandarin and Southern Min
• Huáng (黃), spelled Koh based on its pronunciation in various Southern Min dialects
• Hao (郝), spelled Koh based on its pronunciation in various Southern Min dialects

The surname Koh found among descendants of the Germans of Yugoslavia originated from the German surname Koch. The surname Kuhač is similarly derived.[3]

As a Korean surname, Koh is a variant spelling of the surname most commonly spelled as Ko (based on its McCune–Reischauer transcription; Korean: 고; Hanja: 高; RR: Go).[4][5]

Koh was the 10th-most common surname among ethnic Chinese in Singapore as of 1997 (ranked by English spelling, rather than by Chinese characters). Roughly 48,100 people, or 1.9% of the Chinese Singaporean population at the time, bore the surname Koh.[6]

According to the 2000 South Korean census, there were 435,839 people in 135,488 households with the surname spelled Go in Revised Romanization. Among these, 325,950 people in 100,954 households were members of the Jeju Go clan.[7] This surname is only infrequently spelled as Koh in South Korea: in a study based on a sample of applications for South Korean passports in 2007, 11.4% of applicants with this surname chose to spell it as Koh in the Latin alphabet, against 67.5% who chose to spell it as Ko, and 18.3% as Go.[8]

The 2010 United States Census found 3,595 people with the surname Koh, making it the 9,090th-most-common name in the country. This represented an increase from 2,893 (10,226th-most-common) in the 2000 Census. In both censuses, slightly fewer than nine-tenths of the bearers of the surname identified Asian.[9]