Korean baby naming · One name free
Settled before
the birth
A chart needs a birth, but a name is chosen before one. Two of the four pillars are already fixed by the due window — the year, and usually the month — and those two are enough to say which elements the child will be short of. One real, registrable Korean name free, chosen so its sounds carry what the pillars lack. The full report is five, with why each suits this child and which hanja to write it in — each with its passport spelling, and each hanja marked if Japan's registry takes it too.
How the five are chosen
- Only names in actual use. Candidates come from the Supreme Court's birth-registration tallies, 2008 onward — not from combining characters until something looks like a name.
- Only characters the family register accepts: the 9,090-character 인명용 한자 list, fetched from the court's own service.
- The sounds have to flow. Each syllable's opening consonant carries an element, and a name is kept only when every step feeds the next (상생) rather than fights it. Which consonant carries which element follows the assignment naming practice uses — ㅇ·ㅎ as 土, ㅁ·ㅂ·ㅍ as 水, the 『훈민정음운해』 line. The 훈민정음 해례본 puts those two the other way round, and schools divide there.
- Not last decade's name, and not the one there will be three of in the classroom. Both are read from the same yearly rankings.
- Every name comes with its passport spelling — 국어의 로마자 표기법, the government's system — and its katakana, and each hanja spelling says whether Japan's birth registry accepts those characters too. About 2,800 characters are on both countries' lists, which is what a Korean-Japanese family needs to know and nobody else says.
The 81-figure verdict tables trace to one author — 熊崎健翁, 『姓名の神秘』 (1929) and 『熊崎式姓名学大奥義』 (1931, openly published by Japan's National Diet Library) — and rest on examples of famous people rather than on any count (Okada 2023). Korean scholarship has concluded that no school of name-reading has been validated (Kwon 2019, 2023) and traced the 81-figure method to the 1940 forced-name-change period (Kim 2014). So the 사격 figures are computed and printed, and nothing is judged by them. The sources are listed below.
- 김만태, 「창씨개명 시기에 전파된 일본 성명학(姓名學)의 영향」, 동아시아문화연구 57 (2014)
- 권익기, 『한국 성명학의 작명 관련 비판적 연구』, 동방문화대학원대학교 박사학위논문 (2019)
- 권익기, 「주요 성명학의 작명법 비판적 고찰」, 역사와 융합 7(4) (2023)
- 권익기, 「한글소리 이름짓기의 비판적 고찰」, 한국학 44(1) (2021)
- 岡田誠, 「熊崎式姓名判断の源流」, 人体科学 32(1) (2023)
- 熊崎健翁, 『熊崎式姓名学大奥義』 天·地·人之巻, 五聖閣 (1931) — 国立国会図書館デジタルコレクション pid 1104854·1104862·1104872, インターネット公開
- 대조한 공개 81수 표 (2026-09-05): sajuabc.com 「성명학 수리 해설」 · kimtaku.com 「81수리이론」 · seimei-handan.com 「画数の意味」
- 이재승·김만태, 「한국 성씨한자의 자원오행에 대한 고찰」, 문화와융합 40(3) (2018)