Column
Loanwords (외래어) — You Already Know These Words, You Just Can't Hear Them Yet
Read these out loud, slowly, one syllable at a time:
아 이 스 크 림
스 트 레 스
컴 퓨 터
Ice cream. Stress. Computer.
You didn’t translate them — you heard them, once you slowed down enough. That is the whole trick of this article. Korean has borrowed a large amount of English, and it keeps borrowing more, but it rewrites every borrowed word on the way in. The rewrite is not random. Once you can run it backwards, a whole category of Korean vocabulary stops being something you memorise.
The previous article was about Sino-Korean, where an English speaker starts from nothing. This one is the opposite: here you start with everything, and only have to learn the disguise.
Why they look so strange: Korean syllables are small
English is comfortable with consonants stacked against each other. Strike opens with three in a row. Korean syllables can’t do that — a Korean syllable takes one consonant, then a vowel, then at most one closing consonant.
So Korean does the only thing it can: it gives each stranded consonant its own syllable, using ㅡ as the filler vowel.
| English | Korean | What happened |
|---|---|---|
| ski | 스키 | s got its own syllable |
| stress | 스트레스 | s and t each got one, and so did the final ss |
| strike | 스트라이크 | three at the front, one at the back |
| Christmas | 크리스마스 | Ch and s split off |
| 프린트 | p at the front, t at the back |
ㅡ is the filler because it is the most neutral vowel Korean has — the one closest to no vowel at all. If it isn’t a sound you can place yet, it’s covered in the sounds article.
This one rule explains most of the length. 스트레스 looks like a five-syllable word and is really a one-syllable English word wearing four extra jackets.
When the last consonant stays put
Not every final consonant gets a syllable of its own. Some become a 받침 — the closing consonant slot — and the word stays short:
| Stays as 받침 | Gets 으 instead |
|---|---|
| 컵 (cup) | 케이크 (cake) |
| 북 (book) | 데스크 (desk) |
| 캣 (cat) | 파트 (part) |
| 갭 (gap) | 테스트 (test) |
The split turns on the vowel before it. A short vowel followed by p, t or k at the end of a word keeps that consonant as a 받침 — cup, book, cat. Anything else pushes it out into its own syllable: cake has a diphthong before the k, so 케이크; desk has another consonant in the way, so 데스크.
Four other endings are far more predictable, and they cover a lot of ground:
| Ending | Becomes | Examples |
|---|---|---|
| -ng | ㅇ 받침 | 쇼핑 (shopping), 마케팅 (marketing), 링 (ring) |
| -n | ㄴ 받침 | 디자인 (design), 패턴 (pattern), 라인 (line) |
| -m | ㅁ 받침 | 팀 (team), 홈 (home), 시스템 (system) |
| -l | ㄹ 받침 | 호텔 (hotel), 스타일 (style), 파일 (file) |
All four land in the 받침 slot, which is one more reason that slot repays study — see the 받침 article if those sounds aren’t settled yet.
Sounds Korean doesn’t have
The other half of the disguise is that English uses sounds Korean doesn’t. Each one has a fixed substitute, so this is a lookup table rather than a guessing game.
| English sound | Becomes | Examples |
|---|---|---|
| f | ㅍ | 커피 (coffee), 필름 (film), 팬 (fan) |
| v | ㅂ | 비디오 (video), 서비스 (service), 커버 (cover) |
| z | ㅈ | 제로 (zero), 퀴즈 (quiz), 재즈 (jazz) |
| r and l | both ㄹ | 라디오 (radio), 레벨 (level) |
That last row is the one that costs you. Korean has a single liquid consonant where English has two, so r and l arrive at the same place — and going backwards, a ㄹ could have been either. 레벨 is level; 라벨 is label. The ㄹ alone will not tell you which sound was in the original.
There is one hint. When an l falls between two vowels, it doubles:
- 컬러 (colour) — doubled ㄹ
- 카메라 (camera) — single ㄹ
Colour has an l, camera has an r. So a doubled ㄹㄹ in the middle of a word is usually an l, and a single one is usually an r.
th needs a caveat rather than a row of its own. At the end of a word or in front of another consonant it is regular: it becomes 스. That is why thrill is 스릴 and thriller is 스릴러. Between two vowels it is much less predictable, and some long-settled spellings went their own way entirely — marathon is 마라톤, with a ㅌ. Trust the first position; look the second one up.
Running it backwards
Put the three parts together and you have a procedure. When you meet an unfamiliar 외래어:
- Say it out loud at speed, not syllable by syllable.
- Delete every ㅡ and see what is left.
- Undo the substitutes — ㅍ might be f, ㅂ might be v, ㅈ might be z, ㄹ might be l or r.
Try it cold:
- 프로그램 → p-r-o-g-r-a-m. Program.
- 아이디어 → idea.
- 패션 → fashion. (-tion and -sion land on -션 almost every time: 액션, 버전, 미션.)
- 바이러스 → virus. That ㅂ was a v.
One extra habit: Korean shortens long loanwords aggressively, so if the backwards read gives you half a word, go looking for the other half.
| Korean | Full original |
|---|---|
| 리모컨 | remote control |
| 에어컨 | air conditioner |
| 아파트 | apartment |
| 스펙 | specification |
The trap: English parts, not English words
Here is where the technique stops being free. Some Korean words are built out of English pieces but were assembled in Korea, and no English speaker uses them. Reading them backwards gives you an English phrase that is not the meaning.
| Korean | Reads as | Actually means |
|---|---|---|
| 핸드폰 | hand phone | mobile phone |
| 노트북 | notebook | laptop |
| 원피스 | one piece | a dress |
| 원룸 | one room | studio apartment |
| 헬스 | health | the gym |
| 스킨십 | skinship | physical affection |
| 파이팅 | fighting | you can do it |
| 아이쇼핑 | eye shopping | window shopping |
| 셀카 | self camera | a selfie |
These are not mistakes and not slang. 핸드폰 is what the phone is called. Treating them as broken English is the fastest way to sound strange in the other direction.
셀카 is worth a second look, because it is both things at once: it is a contraction, of 셀프카메라 — and the phrase it contracts was assembled in Korea to begin with. Shortening does not tell you that the long form was ever English.
A second version of the same trap is a genuine English word that arrived with a shifted or narrowed meaning:
- 서비스 — often free of charge, something the shop throws in.
- 미팅 — a meeting, but also a group blind date.
- 커닝 — cheating on an exam. From cunning.
- 콘센트 — an electrical outlet.
So the backwards read gets you a candidate, exactly like the syllable-splitting habit in the last article. Check it against the sentence before you trust it.
Not everything came from English
A smaller group came from other languages, and several of those arrived through Japanese, which is why they refuse to decode from English at all:
- 아르바이트 (usually shortened to 알바) — a part-time job, from German Arbeit.
- 앙케트 — a survey, from French enquête.
- 빵 — bread, from Portuguese pão.
If a word looks like it ought to be English and stubbornly isn’t, this is often why.
Where you’ll meet them: the news
Loanwords are not confined to fashion and coffee. Korean news runs on them, particularly for anything modern, technical or economic:
리스크 · 인프라 · 플랫폼 · 글로벌 · 데이터 · 온라인 · 시스템 · 가이드라인 · 브리핑 · 리콜
Notice what that does to a headline. Sino-Korean carries the formal machinery — 정부, 발표, 확대, 규제 — and 외래어 carries the modern nouns. One sentence about tech regulation will hand you both, and the two want opposite reading strategies: the first you take apart into syllables, the second you say out loud.
What to actually do
Add one step to how you meet a new word. If it is long and full of ㅡ, don’t reach for a dictionary yet — say it at full speed first. A good share of the time, you already knew it.
Then open a recent daily edition and scan for the ㅡ-heavy words specifically. You’ll find them clustered in the technology and business articles, and you’ll read most of them before you look anything up.