Open the app — Korean Studies Web Dictionary
When an unfamiliar word turns up in an old text, one dictionary is rarely enough.
It is not in the hanja dictionary, so you open an idu glossary; not there either, so you try the medical terminology list, and end up in an encyclopedia.
Half a dozen tabs later, you have lost the sentence you were reading.
This dictionary searches more than twenty sources at once.
One query, and every dictionary carrying that word appears on a single screen.
There are 1.42 million headwords.
How to Use
Just type
Enter a word and press return. Results come grouped by dictionary.
Seeing which source a definition came from lets you judge for yourself how much weight to give it.
As you type, autocomplete appears below.
When you are unsure of a headword’s exact form, typing the first characters and picking from the list is faster.
Move with ↑ ↓ and confirm with Enter.
In Hangul or in hanja
Dictionaries write headwords differently — some pair the forms as 한국(韓國), others bracket them as 물[水].
Left as-is, you would have to match the written form exactly, which is a harsh thing to ask of someone who is looking a word up.
So headwords are split apart and all forms registered in advance.
| Headword as written | Any of these finds it |
|---|---|
한국(韓國) | 한국, 韓國 |
물[水] | 물, 水 |
Whether you know only the Hangul or are staring at the hanja, you arrive at the same place.
Variant characters are reconciled
The same character often has more than one written form — 峰 and 峯, 裡 and 裏.
Different texts use different shapes, so typing exactly what you saw frequently returns nothing.
This dictionary maps variants onto a representative form before searching.
Either shape gets you to the same entry.
Following ☞
Definitions often point elsewhere, as in ☞ 족궐음간경(足厥陰肝經).
Click that word and you jump straight to its entry — no retyping.
Keeping what you found
Searching updates the address bar with the word.
Save that link and reopening it goes straight back to the same results — handy for sending to someone, or for a footnote.
Your browser’s back button walks through the words you looked up.
The headword index
[표제어 인덱스] at the bottom of the page lists the headwords themselves.
When you are not sure what to search for, it is a good way to get a feel for what this dictionary holds.
What’s Inside
The sources were chosen to avoid leaning on any single field. The main ones:
| Area | Dictionaries |
|---|---|
| Hanja and Sino-Korean | Hanyu Da Cidian, Dankook Sino-Korean dictionary, Dankook hanja character dictionary, Zhonghua dictionary |
| Classical terminology | Historical term usage dictionaries (AKS), specialized term usage dictionary (AKS), classical translation term usage dictionary, old-letters lexicon (AKS) |
| Idu and legal terms | Idu dictionary, Dankook idu dictionary, old statute glossary |
| Medicine | Encyclopedia of Oriental Medicine, standard Korean medicine terminology (AKOM), materia medica dictionary, herbal origin dictionary |
| Objects and encyclopedic | Mulmyeonggo, Encyclopedia of Korean Culture (AKS), Korean costume dictionary |
| Bilingual | Naver Korean–Chinese and Chinese–Korean, Japanese dictionary |
Good to Know
You wait once
There is a short wait on the first screen while the headword index and hanja fonts load.
After that each search pulls only the pieces it needs — the 1.42 million headwords are split into small chunks rather than held whole.
From the second search on there is essentially no wait.
Downloaded chunks stay cached in the browser, so return visits are fast too.
So hanja don’t show as boxes
Classical dictionaries are full of extension-block characters that ordinary fonts render as empty boxes.
The site therefore loads fonts with wide hanja coverage alongside the data.
That is part of what the brief initial wait is doing.
Each dictionary has its own rights holder
Every source here was compiled by someone.
If you quote what you find, say which dictionary it came from — one reason every result is labelled with its source.
Spot a wrong or missing definition? Use [오류신고] at the bottom of the page.
Goes well with
- If the hanja itself is hard to type, enter it with the Unicode Hanja IME — shape is enough, no reading required.
- To convert dates in your source, see the East Asian Chronology.
- To unify variant characters across a document of your own, use Hanzi Normalization — the same basis this dictionary searches by.
- To dock all three beside your browser, there is the Korean Studies Toolkit Chrome extension — select a word and look it up in place.
Open the app — Korean Studies Web Dictionary