Bae, also spelled Bai or Pae, is a Korean family name. The South Korean census of 2000 found 372,064 people by this surname, or slightly 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 Bai, Pae, 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. A common question when people sharing this surname meet is, "Does your pear have a stem or not?", as the Korean word for "pear" is also bae.
The same character is also used to write the Chinese surname Pei, and is also the origin of the Vietnamese surname Bùi.
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