Skip to content
EveryLingua
EN

4  ·  40 words

Four-character idioms

The four-syllable sayings Koreans use in everyday speech.

A 사자성어 is a set phrase of four Sino-Korean syllables, most of them from old Chinese stories and sayings. They are far more common in ordinary Korean than Latin tags are in English: on the news, at work, in a message to a friend. Grammatically each one is a noun and takes 이에요, 으로 or 하다 like any other. The hints give the literal meaning of the four syllables; the gloss gives what the phrase means today.

The words

This list belongs to Idioms, sound words and loanwords — seven lists and 280 words that can also be practised as a whole.

Practise this list

Multiple choice and gaps, drawn from exactly these 40 words. Whatever you get wrong comes back tomorrow.