垈

垈 designates a piece of land prepared for habitation — the site upon which a house stands or ground reserved for building.

It is a national character (國字), created within Korea (and later shared with Japan) to represent a local concept not fully covered by classical Chinese characters.

Semantic compound formed by combining:

代 (대신할 대) — phonetic base, borrowed for its sound dae, originally meaning “to replace” or “to succeed.”

土 (흙 토) — semantic component, denoting earth, land, soil.

Originally, the word 대 (“plot of land, foundation”) was written with 代, through phonetic loan — the borrowing of a similar-sounding character for a new meaning.

Later, to make the semantic intent explicit, the earth radical 土 was added beneath, producing the distinct national character 垈, literally “earth (土) beneath 代.”

Explanation (local origin):

Someone, noticing that 代 was being used loosely to mean “house site,” created a new form with 土 below to clarify its meaning — thus 垈 emerged as a clarified graph rather than a purely etymological evolution.

Hence 垈 belongs to the category of Kokuji (國字) — characters coined in Korea and Japan for local lexical needs.

垈地 (대지) — building site; plot of land

垈名 (대명) — land title, name of a plot

宅垈 (택대) — residential land

垈號 (대호) — lot number or land designation

田垈 (전대) — farmland and homestead

In modern Korean usage, 대지 (垈地) remains the most common form — referring to residential or construction land in property registers and legal contexts.

In Japanese, 垈 is also found in certain place names (地名), read as -da or -tai, e.g.

山垈 (Yamatai)

垈村 (Taimura)

Although not part of the common Jōyō kanji set, it survives as a jinmeiyō kanji (人名用漢字) in personal and geographic names.

垈 does not appear in pre-Qin or classical Chinese sources.

Its formation likely occurred during the post-Han era as Chinese-character culture spread across East Asia.

In Korea, the word 대 was used natively for “house lot” or “site,” and 代 served as a phonetic approximation in administrative or legal texts.

The adaptation of 土 below 代 thus follows a common East Asian orthographic practice:

- semantic clarification by adding a radical (often 土 for land-related words, 水 for liquids, 木 for trees, etc.)

- parallel to other local coinages such as 畓 (답, paddy field) and 峴 (현, mountain pass).

In Japan, 垈 entered dictionaries as a gokuji (国字), sometimes described as a “ghost character” due to its rare and inconsistent appearance in early Unicode and JIS standards.

Symbolic interpretation:

The addition of 土 (earth) beneath 代 visually symbolizes the grounding of human life in land — the inheritance and occupation of the earth from one generation to the next.

It subtly echoes the sense of succession (代) — that each generation (代) rests upon the earth (土) and passes it onward.

垈, therefore, is more than “land” it is the enduring foundation where human lineage and dwelling take root.