Measurements and method
Most sentences on this site cite an operator or a public body. A few do not: they come from counting what this site has already written down — how often a name appears on the restaurant menus it records, for instance.
Those figures have nowhere outside to cite, so they are published here. The numbers below are not typed into this page. They are counted again from this site’s place records every time the page is built, so they move when the records do.
Guk, tang, jjigae, jeongol — the endings a menu actually uses
Menu lines on this site whose Korean name ends in one of the four soup-family endings, counted by ending.
| Ending | Menu lines |
|---|---|
| -찌개 | 1 |
| -전골 | 4 |
| -국 | 8 |
| -탕 | 28 |
The population is 99 restaurants carrying a menu and 216 menu lines between them, of which 41 end in one of the four.
Against the official notation list
Read on 2026-09-07, 한식진흥원’s notation list for Korean menu items holds 778 entries: all 45 ending in -국 become Soup, all 20 in -찌개 become Stew, all 15 in -전골 become Hot Pot. Only -탕 splits — 51 entries going 34 Soup and 15 Stew, with two more (고구마맛탕, 닭볶음탕) that are not liquid dishes at all. Of the menu lines above, 12 appear in that list verbatim — 29%. Across every menu line this site holds, 38% do.
What these figures do not establish
The table describes the restaurants this site has recorded, not restaurants in Korea. It is a sample of what one travel site chose to write down. The comparison figures (12 lines, 29%, 38%) rest on one reading of an external list on the date given above and, unlike the table, are not recounted. And nothing here says how a tang differs from a guk in a kitchen — no source for that has been found.