Korean in Quora Forum

Neky Choe (Kim Jinwon), knows Korean

Author has 2.2K answers and 4.6M answer views

Well, there are some ways for clarifying homonyms in Korean.

First, in scientific or technical passages, we sometimes have homonymous Sino-Korean words. In this situation, we often write hanja (Chinese characters) in brackets.

이것을 수도라고 한다.

→ 이것을 수도(水道)라고 한다. (This is called an aquaduct.)

→ 이것을 수도(首都)라고 한다. (This is called a capital city.)

But when we speak, we can’t use this. So, we have to rely on the context or sometimes sentence structure, like how we deal with “meet/meat”, or “see/sea/C”, or “sale/sail” in English.