קים / Kim / 金 / 김 / きん (キム)

 

Preface:

Here is my investigation about the Korean word “김” which means gold in Chinese characters.

I have tried to make a concise, coherent, simple and accurate summary based on the: meaning, history of origin, how it is pronounced or considered in similar (relatively not distant) languages, how and why it is being written and so on.

This is not my area of expertise and I am sorry in advance for any inconsistencies or mistakes.

There are two similar ways (kanjis) to write Kim: “킴” and “김”.

In Korea, ‘Kim’ as ‘킴’, is usually recognized as a surname whereas In English-speaking countries, ‘Kim’ as ‘김’ , is a given name, not a surname, except for those of Chinese, Korean, and Cambodian descent.

When speaking in fluent Korean the name ‘Kim’ is written as ‘김’ (gim). This is due to mispronunciation (solecism / grammatical error)

While romanized as ‘Kim’ by 99.3% of the population, other rare variant romanizations such as Gim, Ghim, and Kin make up the remaining 0.7%.
if you mean the korean surname kim, you write it like 김 (gim, with a ㄱ not a ㅋ). now if you mean kim, the english given name, that would 킴.

Gold “金” (pinyin : jīn , Zhuyin : ㄐㄧㄣˉ , Yuepin : gam1 , pronounced the same as “今” ), is achemical element with the chemical symbol Au (derived from Latin: Aurum; chemically: ₇₉Au)

• pinyin = most common romanization system for Standard Chinese

• Zhuyin = transliteration system for Standard Chinese and other Sinitic languages for the Mandarin Chinese.

• Yuepin = romanization system for Cantonese Chinese.

A radical (Chinese: 部首; pinyin: bùshǒu; lit. ‘section header’) or indexing component, is a method from historically character dictionaries that have been indexed using radical-and-stroke sorting, where characters are grouped by radical and sorted within each group by stroke number. Most “bùshǒu” include semantic or even phonetic qualities (structure & phonetic components) but it is typically a semantic component, but it can also be another structural component or an artificially extracted portion of the character. It means that if you can identify a character’s radical, then you’ll be able to guess the meaning or sound without even knowing the character in the first place.

So, continuing the basic and simplified version is that basically it is “金” and “釒/钅” when used as a left Chinese radical (‘the left radical component of gold’). In other words, While the “金”stands for its own and means usually “Gold”, sometimes it can be referred to “Metal” (in classical Chinese) whereas the other variants are being written in a way to what is called “construct” (סְמִיכוּת) – Example for this is for “釒” that it is ‘the left radical component of gold’:

• “釛” means “gold”.

• “鉄” means “iron” (or 铁 in simplified) – Literally means “black metal”.

• “釧” means “bracelet”.

• “釣” means “angling”, “fish”.

• “釟” means “anneal”.

…and many more examples.

Basically, any Chinese character that contains the standard component 「 钅」 or 「釒」 is, to some extent, related to metal.

gold; money; metal; Kim; King; Kinshasha; metals in general, precious, excellent.

Chinese: 金 = Chin

Korean: 금 = Kim

Japanese: 金 = Kin

https://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/chinese-english/金

n. Jin (a family name); Jin Dynasty (1115-1234)

Last updated: Oct 16, 2025