Preamble

It is approaching a year since we last looked at words of Korean origin in the Oxford English Dictionary (OED). That report was very kindly picked up by the dictionary in an article which alerted me to even more words of Korean origin being added in the December 2025 update. Namely, haenyeo, ajumma, sunbae, jjimjilbang, officetel, ramyeon, bingsu, and, perhaps a little more dubiously in this category, Korean barbecue. If any are unfamiliar, the OED post clarifies their meanings and first attestations.

These words, all nouns, denote entities across quite a wide range of semantic domains including professions, social types of people, leisure venues, and urban accommodation. Three of these words, though, name food items in Korean cuisine. Restricting ourselves to words of Korean origin, we see that this is a very popular category for loanwords into English. Of the 54 words of Korean origin currently in the OED 19 are names of foods or beverages. There are furthermore two arguable edge cases related to Korean cuisine; haenyeo, after all, are involved in the production of seafood and aquaculture while mukbang very frequently involves the consumption and presentation of food.

Korean food is often characterised as part of the K-Wave and, in the UK where the OED is produced, Korean food is arguably the primary association people have with Korea (as noted here and here). To mark this update, then, we will focus on food-related words in the OED. First, we will examine the dates of their first reported attestations and entry into the dictionary to consider the possible role of the K-Wave, then we will move on to their frequency of use in the dictionary’s reference corpora over recent years.

The Data

The data once more consist of words of Korean origin found through the OED’s advanced search function along with annualised frequency information for the years 2017-2025, where available. The calculation of the frequency is described a follows:

Modern frequency series are derived from a corpus of 20 billion words, covering the period from 2017 to the present. The corpus is mainly compiled from online news sources, and covers all major varieties of World English.

Smoothing has been applied to series for lower-frequency words, using a moving-average algorithm. This reduces short-term fluctuations, which may be produced by variability in the content of the corpus.

As noted above, the data is filtered to include only the 19 words of Korean origin unambiguously drawn from Korean cuisine along with the edge cases mukbang and Korean barbecue in the first instance, then the subset of those words for which recent frequency data is made available.

Visualisations

The below plot shows the dates of first attestation and entry into the dictionary. Only those words that appear in the purple quadrant were both firt attested and entered into the OED after the conventional ‘start’ of the Korean Wave.

Once more, we see a clear pattern of words being added to the dictionary following the commonly cited inception of the K-Wave in 1997. Only a relatively small proportion of words that have been added to the dictionary to date, though, were first attested during that period.

Unfortunately, the period for which annualised frequency data is provided is too recent to give us an indication of how the early days of the K-Wave are reflected (or perhaps how the K-Wave was constituted) by the frequency of K-Food words in English. Nevertheless, their frequency over the years in relation to the word hallyu (the purple line in the visualisation) gives some indication of their current, key role in the representation of Korea in English. This is visualised, with one key exclusion, below.

There is, of course, much variation in K-Food words’ frequency of use, but a considerable number of them appear more frequently in the reference corpora than the term hallyu and continue to trend upwards as the frequency of the term hallyu appears to be in decline. One special point to note is that just as kimchi was an outlier in terms of how early its first attested use was, so it is an outlier in terms of its contemporary frequency of use relative to other Korean food words in the OED. This can can be clearly seen by the change in scale of the visualisation in which the frequency data for kimchi is included, below.

More details of which word appears with what relative frequency in which year can be found by hovering over the lines in the below interactive visualisation.

Conclusion

In summary, an increasing number of words drawn from the field of Korean cuisine have been used in English over the twentieth century. It appears that it was only with the K-Wave’s full-scale arrival in Europe in the 2010s that these words have been entered into the OED. The frequency with which these words are used, though, is not high. That many of them are used more frequently than the word hallyu is suggestive of K-Food playing an important role in the construction of the image of Korea, and consequently the K-Wave, in the Anglosphere. The role of food in the K-Wave at large, though, is well worth further investigation.

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)