Sul and Sul-Sul: The Korean Wordplay Behind a Good Drink

Sul and Sul-Sul: The Korean Wordplay Behind a Good Drink

Sul, Sul-Sul: The Korean Word for Alcohol, and the Sound of Things Going Down Easy

In Korean, alcohol is called sul (술). There's also a word, sul-sul (술술), that describes something moving along smoothly — food going down easily, a story unfolding without effort, a knot coming loose on its own. The two words aren't actually related in origin. But they sound close enough, and once you notice it, it's hard to unnotice — because in practice, that's exactly what alcohol tends to do at a Korean table. Conversation loosens up. Food seems to taste better. The evening just moves.

Korean drinking culture, from the outside, can look like it's mostly about the alcohol itself — soju shots, beer, makgeolli in a bowl instead of a glass. But almost nobody in Korea drinks without anju (안주), food meant specifically to go alongside it. Pajeon, the savory scallion pancake, pairs with makgeolli almost by law of nature — something about the pancake's crisp edges and the drink's slightly sour, milky taste just belongs together. Grilled pork belly and soju is its own kind of institution. Golbaengi muchim, spicy whelk salad, shows up next to beer at almost every neighborhood pub. None of these pairings are random. Korean drinking was never really built around the alcohol alone — it was built around the alcohol and the food arriving together, each one making the other better.

I still think about the first time I really understood sul-sul in my bones, not just as a word. It was my first year of college, during the May festival, at an outdoor gathering our department threw on the lawn in front of the humanities building. I can still feel how the vague tension that had been building all spring — the kind you can't quite name — loosened up, sul-sul, over a single glass of alcohol as evening fell. Plates of makgeolli and pajeon made their way around the grass, and that one drink could send us into fits of laughter one moment, and then, just as easily, into the kind of conversation where everyone suddenly seemed to be carrying the weight of the whole world. We stayed up all night, more than once, on nights like that.

Even now, looking at a glass of alcohol in front of me, those spring evenings come back to me first — and along with them, the faces that were sitting there on the grass with me. I find myself wondering where they all ended up, and missing them, more than I expected to.

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