Where the Lee name comes from

Lee is several different names that arrived at the same spelling in English. The English Lee is the Old English leah, a meadow, and it named the family that lived beside one. The Chinese Lee is 李, Li, the fourth name in the Hundred Family Surnames and one of the most common surnames on earth, traced by tradition to Gao Yao, a minister of the Xia dynasty, with Laozi the first historical person known to have carried it.

The Korean Lee is 이, second only to Kim in Korea, written historically as Ni and formally respelled in 1933. There is an Irish Lee as well, from Laoi. So one spelling on one sign can point at a meadow in England, a dynasty in China or a clan in Korea.