 The 2000 South Korean Census found 55,309 people with the family name Chu.It could be written with either of two hanja, indicating different lineages.A study by the National Institute of the Korean Language based on year 2007 application data for South Korean passports found that 55.1% of applicants with this surname chose to spell it in Latin letters as "Chu" in their passports, while 43.1% spelled it as "Choo".