가락 Meaning; Fingers, Spoons and more

가락 Words

• 손가락: fingers (손 = hand)
• 발가락: toes (발 = foot)
• 숟가락: spoon (숟 = 술)
• 젓가락: chopsticks (저 = 箸)
• 가락엿: Korean taffy stick (엿 = Korean traditional candy)

So What is 가락 Meaning?

가락 means something that is long and thin. It can also be used as a unit word that can count objects in that shape.

For chopsticks, 젓가락 is a combination of 저(箸) + 가락. 저 comes from the Chinese word for chopsticks. 저 becomes 젓 because of 사이시옷 (which I’ll get into a bit at the bottom, and maybe a full post on this later!)

For spoon 숟가락 is a combination of 술 + 가락. 술 is an old Korean word for spoons and becomes 숟 because of a Batchim rule. You can still see 술 used, more so now it is used when measuring something by a spoonful, like a tablespoon (큰술) and a teaspoon (작은술).

Quick Run Through on 사이시옷

This specific rule is a bit tricky for Korean learners. Because it depends on whether a word is a compound word or not. But applies more so to compound words that use a native Korean word, no combinations of two foreign words or Hanja-based words.

So how do you know if a word is one applies to it? Or remember all of them? It’s a lot of memorization, or just going through the process of being corrected, honestly.

Some examples are:

비 + 소리 = 빗소리: sound of water
차 + 집 = 찻집: tea house
해 + 빛 = 햇빛: sunlight

I have an old post about this on my Tumblr, which you may find by looking for this topic, but I wanted to officially move it over here for people to use more easily!