Japchae

[Benjamin Barrett]

The other day, I saw "jap chay" written on the window of one of those teriyaki joints so often run by Korean immigrants. While that's a sensible way to spell it to assist with pronunciation, it increases the number of spellings of the dish.

Wikipedia has three spellings: japchae, jabchae and chapchae. The first two have -y alternates on Google, bringing the total to at least seven spellings. ("Chabchay" does not seem to be in use.) This can be doubled by using a space between the two syllables.

I didn't do an exhaustive search for all spellings, but the only hit I found on the ADS archives is "chapchae'" by Barry Popik in 2002 (http://ow.ly/8mwcm).

Benjamin Barrett
Seattle, WA

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