To this day, Korea has maintained a close relationship with China. Through the processes of long-term cultural exchange, the Korean language has imported lots of Chinese words through the medium of Chinese characters. The main purpose of the adoption of Chinese characters for Korea was to satisfy the demand for writing, so at the beginning, most Sino-Korean pronunciations might be related tightly to their graphic forms, and only used in the limited language environments of reading texts. But as the time passes, Chinese loan words have gradually replaced native Korean words, and been able to appear in colloquial conversations. Some loan words have lost their connection with their graphic forms, and Korean speakers may mistake them for native Korean words.
In this article, the author introduces three approaches to search for and identify plausible original characters: character-search, sound-search, and meaning-search, and gives some detailed methods for searching for the original characters of Chinese loan words which have lost connection with their graphic forms in Korean.