Oxford dictionary to add 26 Korean words amid Squid Game craze

Oxford English Dictionary will add 26 words of Korean origin as Netflix drama “Squid Game” and celebrities take the world by storm.

The new words include “hallyu”, the original Korean word for the country's wave of pop culture. 

The names of Korean dishes are also among the new vocabularies, such as “bulgogi” (Korean grilled meat) and “kimbap” (seaweed rice roll similar to Japanese sushi).

Other entries include “Hanbok”, the traditional Korean costume, “mukbang”, videos featuring a person eating large amounts of food and talking to an audience, as well as “aegyo”, a type of cuteness considered characteristically Korean.

But not all the newly added words are loan translation from Korean. An example is the word “fighting!”, used as an expression of encouragement and support in a way similar to the phrase “go for it!”

“The adoption and development of these Korean words in English also demonstrate how lexical innovation is no longer confined to the traditional centres of English in the United Kingdom and the United States,” Oxford English Dictionary said in a statement.

“They show how Asians in different parts of the continent invent and exchange words within their own local contexts, then introduce these words to the rest of the English-speaking world, thus allowing the Korean wave to continue to ripple on the sea of English words,” it added.