Abstract

This study analyzes loanwords listed in nine Korean–English and English-Korean bilingual dictionaries published from the late 19th to the early 20th centuries to identify chronological changes and key characteristics. First, the number of loanwords surged in the 1910s, and their proportion in dictionaries increased threefold to tenfold in the 1920s and 1930s. In terms of orthography, transliteration based on Chinese characters dominated until the early 1900s. However, after the 1910s, Hangul-based transliterations became more prevalent, accounting for over two-thirds of the transliterations by the 1920s, with some reflecting Japanese phonological patterns. Five word formation types were identified, with a notable increase in fully transliterated Western words and hybrid forms combining transliteration and Korean morphemes in the later periods. Semantically, early dictionaries focused on concrete general terms such as place names, but from the 1910s onwards, technical and conceptual terms expanded significantly. Notably, Gale (1911) emphasized chemical elements, whereas Jones (1914) featured many Christian terms. In the 1920s, dictionaries increasingly included both concrete terms and abstract concepts. Regarding frequency, place names dominated among words appearing in five or more dictionaries, while those in three or four dictionaries, especially in Kim Dong-seong (1928), spanned diverse semantic fields. In the case of loanwords that appear in only two dictionaries, those in Gale (1911) mostly pertain to chemistry, those in Jones (1914) to religion, those in Underwood (1925) to units and material terms, and those in Kim (1928) and Gale (1931) to conceptual vocabulary.