首爾

Chinese

 
head; chief; first (occasion)
head; chief; first (occasion); first (thing); measure word for poems
phonetic
trad. (首爾) 首 爾
simp. (首尔) 首 尔

Etymology

Borrowed from Korean 서울 (Seoul). The first character 首 (shǒu, “first”) is a phono-semantic matching of Korean.[1]

Pronunciation


Proper noun

首爾

  1. (~市) Seoul (the capital city of South Korea)

Usage notes

  • 漢城/汉城 (Hànchéng) was the name used for the city until 2005, when the city government changed its official Chinese name to 首爾/首尔 (Shǒu'ěr). 漢城/汉城 (Hànchéng) remains to be used in unofficial settings.
  • The use of the original name 漢城/汉城 (Hànchéng) is dispreferred in both Koreas. The name 首爾/首尔 (Shǒu'ěr) was specifically designed for transliterating the Korean name 서울 (^seoul) into modern Standard Chinese and is not a Korean hanja (Sino-Korean) representation of the city name, which doesn't have a hanja form.

Synonyms

References

  1. 李源 (2014 April 27), ““汉城”是如何改名为“首尔””, in 成都商报‎, archived from the original on 2019-03-31
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