Bae (surname)

Bae, also spelled Bai, Pae or Pay, is a Korean family name. The South Korean census of 2015 found 400,641 people by this surname, or less than 1% of the population. In a study by the National Institute of the Korean Language based on 2007 application data for South Korean passports, it was found that 96.8% of people with this family name spelled it in Latin letters as Bae. Rarer alternative spellings (the remaining 3.2%) included Pae, Bai, Pai, Pay, and Bea. There are two different ways to write the name in hanja: the most common (裵), and an alternative (裴) which lacks the "stem" (亠, Radical 8) at the top. The most common character is also used to write the Chinese surname Pei, which is also the origin of the Vietnamese surname Bùi.