How Korea Got Its Name: From Goryeo to the Republic of Korea

Goryeo, the Name That Left

In 918, a general named 왕건 (Wang Geon) founded a new kingdom on the peninsula and named it 고려 (Goryeo). He did not invent the name. He shortened it from 고구려 (Goguryeo), one of the Three Kingdoms that had ruled the northern peninsula and parts of Manchuria centuries earlier, and used the name to claim his new dynasty as its rightful successor. Goryeo ruled for over four hundred years, until 1392.

During those centuries, Goryeo traded with merchants from the Arab world, with recorded contact going back to at least the 9th century. Word of the kingdom traveled west along those trade routes, and by the time European traders and mapmakers began recording the name centuries later, “Goryeo” had passed through enough languages and transliterations to become “Korea.” The dynasty itself was gone by then. The name kept traveling without it.

This is why “Korea” is not the name either Korean government uses. It is a fossil: the English word froze in place around a 14th-century dynasty while the peninsula kept renaming itself.

Joseon, Twice Reclaimed

When Goryeo fell in 1392, the general who overthrew it, 이성계 (Yi Seong-gye), did not invent a name either. He reached further back, to 고조선 (Gojoseon), the peninsula’s legendary first kingdom, and renamed his new dynasty 조선 (Joseon). The claim was continuity with the oldest Korean state on record, not with the dynasty he had just replaced.

Joseon ruled until 1910, when Japan annexed the peninsula. The colonial government kept the name administratively, calling its territory 조선 under the 조선총독부 (Chōsen Sōtokufu, Government-General of Joseon), stripped of the sovereignty the name had once carried.

After liberation and division in 1945, the northern government, established in 1948, kept 조선 as its base name: 조선민주주의인민공화국, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea. North Korea’s choice was not neutral. It positioned the state as heir to the Joseon line, the name Korea had carried, under one government or another, for over five hundred years before the peninsula split.

Daehan, the Name the South Chose

The southern name has a different, shorter history. In 1897, Emperor 고종 (Gojong) declared the end of Joseon’s subordinate status and proclaimed 대한제국 (Daehan Jeguk, the Korean Empire). He revived 한 (Han) from 삼한 (Samhan), the three ancient confederacies that had once occupied the southern peninsula, reaching for a different, older lineage than the one Joseon had claimed.

The empire lasted only thirteen years before Japanese annexation ended it. But the name survived in exile. In 1919, Koreans who fled to Shanghai to form a government in resistance to colonial rule named it 대한민국 (Daehan Minguk): 대한 carried over from the fallen empire, and 민국, literally “people’s state,” replacing the emperor’s sovereignty with the people’s. When South Korea formally established its government in 1948, it adopted that same name, 대한민국, as official.

South Korea’s name is therefore a double revival: an empire’s name grafted onto a republic’s structure, chosen in exile before there was a state to attach it to.

Two governments, one peninsula, and two names that were never in competition with each other so much as answering different questions. The north asked which dynasty it descended from. The south asked which sovereignty it was restoring. Both answers happened to leave “Korea,” the word most of the world uses, tied to a kingdom that ended in 1392 and has no government left to claim it.