Lee
Lee may refer to:
People
Given name
Surname
- Lee (surname 李) or Li (Hanzi 李), a common Chinese surname
- Lee (surname 利) or Li (Hanzi 利), a Chinese surname
Geography
Great Britain
United States of America
Li (surname 李)
Li (Chinese: 李; pinyin: Lǐ) is the second most common surname in China, behind only Wang. It is also one of the most common surnames in the world, shared by 93 million people in China, and more than 100 million worldwide. It is the fourth name listed in the Song dynasty classic text Hundred Family Surnames. According to the Sixth National Population Census of the People's Republic of China, Li takes back the number one surname in China with a population of 95,300,000 (7.94％).
The name is pronounced as "Lei" in Cantonese, but is often spelled as Lee in Hong Kong, Macau, Taiwan and many other overseas Chinese communities. In Macau, it is also spelled as Lei. In Indonesia it is commonly spelled as Lie.
The common Korean surname, Lee (also romanized as Yi, Ri, or Rhee), and the Vietnamese surname, Lý, are both derived from Li and are historically written with the same Chinese character, 李. The character also means "plum" or "plum tree".
According to tradition, the Li surname originated from the title Dali held by Gao Yao, a legendary minister of the Xia dynasty, and was originally written with the different character, 理. Laozi (Li Er), the founder of Taoism, was the first historical person known to have the surname and is regarded as the founding ancestor of the surname.
Lee (English given name)
Lee is a given name derived from the English surname Lee (which is ultimately from a placename derived from Old English leah "clearing; meadow"). As the surname of Robert E. Lee (1807-1870), the name became popular in the American South after the Civil War, its popularity peaking in 1900 at rank 39 as a masculine name, and in 1955 at rank 182 as a feminine name. The name's popularity declined steadily in the second half of the 20th century, falling below rank 1000 by 1991 as a feminine name, and to 666 as of 2012 as a masculine name. In the later 20th century, it also gained some popularity in the United Kingdom, peaking among the 20 most popular boys' names during the 1970s to 1980s, but it had fallen out of the top 100 by 2001.
Lee is also a hypocoristic form of the given names Ashley, Beverly, Kimberley, and Leslie (all of which are also derived from English placenames containing -leah as a second element; with the possible exception of Leslie, which may be an anglicization of a Gaelic placename).
