Choi surname meaning

Choi is the most familiar South Korean romanization of 崔, also written Choe and represented by Chinese Cui or Cantonese forms in other contexts. The character is commonly glossed as “high,” “lofty,” or “towering,” but that gloss is not a personal description applied to every ancestor. Korean Choi families belong to distinct bon-gwan clan lines, and the United States Census spelling can gather related-looking regional forms. The catalog uses nickname as the closest of its four broad types for a character-based descriptive gloss, with likely confidence rather than treating it as a European-style byname.