Preamble

It has been a busy month. There has not really been time for a deep analysis of anything, so instead we focus on the visualisation of a well-understood dataset. Specifically, in this report we briefly review the words of Korean origin in the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) as of early 2025 with a special focus on the influence of the Korean Wave.

The Data

The advanced online search function of the OED allows users to search by words’ language of origin. Doing so for Korean returned 48 entries, which could be downloaded in tabular format. As well as the headword, the data included the date of the first attested use of these words, their part of speech, and their frequency. We supplemented this data by adding the date the headword added to the dictionary, which can be found in each word’s online entry.

Visualisations

Each of the words of Korean origin in the OED, along with their year of entry into the dictionary and the date of the first attested use recorded there can be visualised in a scatter plot as below.

Clearly, most of the words of Korean origin in the OED were first attested in English after 1950, but only added to the dictionary after the year 2000. We focus on this group of words in the following visualisation, this time varying the size of the points in the scatter plot with larger points representing more frequent words.

For an alternative view that emphasises the form of the words and their relative frequency, we can use a wordcloud. The words are scaled by their relative frequency and retain the colours of the above visualisations to represent their year of entry into the dictionary.

While simple, these visualisations concisely and intuitively summarise a great deal of information about the use and lexicography of words of Korean origin in English.

A Note on Frequency

A full account of how OED calculates and bands word frequency can be found here. It is worth noting that the bands go beyond those represented by words of Korean origin. These words range from 0 to 5 in the frequency bands, but the bands themselves go all the way up to 8. This highest band is reserved for words which occur with a frequency greater than one thousand times per million words in one of the reference corpora used. As the number assigned to the band decreases, the frequency of the words it contains decreases by an order of magnitude at each band. That is, band 7 words occur with a frequency of between 100 and 999 times, band six words between 10 and 99 times, and band 2 words (which accounts for 45% of English words, regardless of origin) less than 0.01 times per million words. The most surprising point for us are the number words of Korean origin, especially among recent entries, which are banded at 0. This band is not explained on the OED website, although it does include the clarification that “frequency information is not given for obsolete words, prefix or suffix entries, initialisms, or initial-letter entries”. None of the words of Korean origin included here meet these criteria.

Conclusion

While words of Korean origin have been attested in English texts stretching back to the nineteenth century, a large number of such words (35) have been added since 1997, the year to which the beginning of the Korean Wave is conventionally attributed (as in our discussion of eras of the K-Wave here). Comparatively few, though (8), were first attested after that time. This observation, raises the question of whether the Korean Wave is actually encouraging the borrowing of Korean words into English.

Furthermore, words of Korean origin do not, at time of writing, occur with very great frequency in the reference corpora used by the OED. Whether this is an artifact of the more recent borrowing of a great many of them should become clear with time. The words banded as having the highest frequency among words of Korean origin are also striking. These are: ri (리 - band 5), taekwondo (태권도 - band 4), chaebol (채벌 - band 4), Juche (주체 - band 4), and manhwa (만화 - band 4). Taken together, they reflect an image of Korea that is very little, if at all, informed by the Korean Wave. Should current levels of engagement with Korea be maintained, and should it continue to be mediated through popular culture, it would be interesting to see whether words with a greater connection to the Korean Wave will come to match or even surpass these words in frequency.

Acknowledgement
This work was supported by the Core University Program for Korean Studies of the Ministry of Education of the Republic of Korea and Korean Studies Promotion Service at the Academy of Korean Studies (AKS-2021-OLU-2250004)