What is Lee short for?
Lee is a name of its own in English rather than a short form of anything longer, and it is also the spelling Chinese and Korean families use for the surname 李. In 2025, 366 boys and 21 girls in the United States were given Lee as their full name, with nothing longer behind it, according to Social Security records.
The meeting point
A special case: one side is a given name, the other is a surname that a quarter of a country writes the same way.
Lee · the English given name Lee, Old English lēah, "clearing" (source)
李 · 李, "plum tree": a SURNAME on both the Chinese and Korean side, never a given name: 98.5% of South Koreans surnamed 이 write it "Lee" in their passports. One spelling, two jobs: a surname there, a given name in English (source)