Jeong (surname)
Jeong is a Latin alphabet rendition of the Korean family name "정", also often spelled Chung, Jung, or Jong. As of the South Korean census of 2000, there were 2,230,611 people by this name in South Korea, or roughly 5% of the population.
Latin-alphabet spelling
In a study by the National Institute of the Korean Language based on a sample of year 2007 applications for South Korean passports, it was found that 48.6% of people with this surname chose to have it spelled it in Latin letters as Jung in their passports. The Revised Romanization transcription Jeong was at second place with 37.0%, while Chung came in third at 9.2%. It was the only one out of the top five surnames (the others being Kim, Park, Lee, and Choi) for which the Revised Romanization spelling was used by more than a few percent of applicants.
Rarer alternative spellings (the remaining 5.2%) included, in order of decreasing frequency, Joung, Cheong, Chong, Jeoung, Jeung, Choung, Jong, Cheung, Juong, Jeng, Chyung, Jaung, Jueng, and Zheng. The spelling Jong, rare in South Korea, is official in North Korea's modified version of the McCune–Reischauer transcription system.