English short form of Kimberly, meaning 'royal meadow.' Also a common Korean surname meaning 'gold.'
Kim is a name of strikingly divergent origins that happen to converge on the same four letters. In the English-speaking world it began as a diminutive of Kimberley, a South African city whose name derives from the Earl of Kimberley — the town was renamed in 1873 at the height of the diamond rush. Rudyard Kipling accelerated the name's independent life with his 1901 novel Kim, whose Anglo-Irish protagonist Kimball O'Hara goes by the single syllable throughout the book; Kipling's Kim is resourceful, ambiguous, and free — qualities the name absorbed into its character for generations of English readers.
In Korea, Kim (김) is the most common surname in the country, borne by roughly twenty-one percent of the population. Its Chinese character, 金, means "gold," and the name traces back to the Silla dynasty founder's origin myth, in which a golden egg produced the first king of the Kim royal lineage. As Korean immigration spread globally through the twentieth century, Kim became one of the most widely carried surnames on earth, bringing an entirely different cultural weight to the same syllable.
In the West, Kim peaked as a given name for women in the 1960s and 70s — riding the wave of Kimberleys being shortened — before becoming strongly associated with that generation. It has since cycled back as a gender-neutral and cross-cultural option. As a standalone name it is crisp, direct, and genuinely multicultural: equally at home in Seoul, Stockholm (where it is a masculine name of Scandinavian origin meaning "ruler"), and California.