Toward a Korean Historical Onomastics through Choson Household Registers: Name-Character Distribution, Social Hierarchy, and Visualization

Donggue Lee, Ajou University
Hyoji Ha, Ajou University

Choson household registers provide a crucial source for tracing the long-term use of name characters in premodern Korean society. Whereas onomastic scholarship has largely developed around Western naming systems and modern civil registration, Choson household registers offer a different historical and methodological horizon. Because personal names were recorded repeatedly within the contexts of household composition, kinship relations, social hierarchy, and local community, these registers make it possible to analyze the selection and reproduction of name characters within a broader social-historical framework. This paper examines adult male name characters in household registers from several regions of late Choson Korea, focusing on how patterns of distribution and selection varied across generations, regions, and social status. In this context, name characters cannot be reduced to mere markers of individual identity or expressions of private family taste. Rather, they reveal socially structured naming practices shaped by lineage succession, social distinction, and the state’s regime of registration. Names, in other words, functioned not only as means of identifying individuals but also as part of the ways in which premodern society classified persons and organized social order. The paper also incorporates digital-humanities approaches by visualizing the analytical results. Reconstructing frequency patterns, repetition, intergenerational transmission, and regional variation makes it possible to present structural features of naming practices more clearly than tables or narrative description alone. By combining quantitative analysis of household-register data with visual interpretation, this approach highlights patterns that are otherwise difficult to capture in conventional textual analysis. More broadly, this study argues that Choson household registers provide a methodological foundation for analyzing historical naming systems in a non-Western society. In doing so, it expands the scope of onomastic scholarship beyond modern Western models and shows how names in premodern Korea operated at the intersection of social hierarchy, family strategy, and state registration.

No extended abstract or paper available

 Presented in Session 152. Understanding Kinship and Family Dynamics