IU is a Rooster, Cha Eun-woo an Ox, Byeon Woo-seok a Goat — and none of it explains why they are famous

IU was born in a Rooster year, and so were Song Hye-kyo and Jun Ji-hyun. Cha Eun-woo is an Ox, alongside Song Joong-ki and Lee Kwang-soo. Byeon Woo-seok is a Goat, with Kim Go-eun and Gong Yoo. Go Youn-jung leads the Rat, Kim Seon-ho the Tiger, Im Yoon-ah the Horse, Bae Suzy the Dog.

That is a real list, and it is the whole of what we are claiming.

The counting

We took 1,047 Korean actors and singers with a date of birth on Wikidata and sorted them by birth year into the twelve signs. Within each sign we ordered names by how often that person’s own Wikipedia article is opened in Indonesia, Vietnam, Thailand and Malaysia, so the name a reader is most likely to recognise comes first.

The part that is easy to misread

The Dog holds 103 people and the Snake 76. That is a gap of 27, and it is the kind of gap a headline gets written about.

It should not be. If 1,047 people were spread perfectly evenly, each sign would hold 87.3 of them, and no real count lands on its average. The question is whether the spread is further from even than chance would produce, and that has a standard answer: a chi-square test.

The figure is 7.77. The threshold for calling a twelve-way split uneven is 19.68. We are well below it. The spread is indistinguishable from chance.

So the Dog leading the Snake by 27 people is what twelve buckets and a thousand birthdays look like when nothing is going on.

Why we are publishing the list anyway

Because “which stars share my sign” is a real question people ask, and the answer is a fact. Who was born in the same year as Kim Woo-bin is not in dispute. What that means about either of them is not something a count can reach, and we are not going to pretend otherwise on the next line.

There is a harder limit underneath. A saju chart — the Korean reading people actually mean when they ask about this — needs the hour of birth as well as the date. Public profiles carry dates and almost never hours. We can tell you that 1,047 actors are spread evenly across twelve years. We cannot produce any one of their charts, and neither can anyone else working from the same public record.

What is not in this

Of the 1,047 people with a sign, 818 could be matched to a read count on the four Southeast Asian Wikipedias. The other 229 keep their names on the page with an empty figure. We do not write zero for them, because not matched and not read are different things, and one of them is our problem rather than theirs.

The sign itself comes from the birth year alone. The lunar new year falls in January or February, so someone born in those months may belong to the previous sign; the source data drops them rather than guessing which.

The full list, all twelve signs, is on which Korean stars share your zodiac sign. The count that says the spread is chance is on the year you were born.