My daughter asked why our elevator panel jumps straight from 3 to 5. The short answer: “sa,” the Korean word for four, is pronounced exactly like “sa,” the word for death. That single homophone also explains why Korea’s army has no 4th Division and why red ink on a name still makes people flinch.
Why “Four” Sounds Like “Death” in Korean
In Korean, the formal number set used for counting floors, money, and military units is borrowed from Chinese, tracing back to hanja, the Chinese characters that once carried all of Korea’s written vocabulary. In that system, “sa” (사, literally “four”) and “sa” (死, literally “death”) are two completely different characters that happen to share the exact same sound. Hangul, Korea’s native alphabet, even writes the number the same way it would sound out loud — 사 — so there’s no spelling difference to lean on, no tone shift, nothing but context to tell the two apart. China and Japan inherited the identical numeral from the same hanzi and kanji root, so the same discomfort shows up in Mandarin (“si”) and Japanese (“shi”) too. Western write-ups sometimes call the whole phenomenon tetraphobia, a word I’d genuinely never heard before I started digging into this for my daughter.
Nobody actually believes an elevator button kills you.
It’s closer, I think, to how some English speakers still won’t book a hotel room on the 13th floor — not superstition exactly, more a habit nobody wants to be the one to break. Maybe it’s the same tidy-mindedness that makes me the guy who reads elevator inspection plates while everyone else just taps the button and waits.
Hospitals Take the Fourth Floor Most Seriously
Hospitals take this more seriously than almost anywhere else — the bigger ones, with a lot of critically ill patients on the premises, are known to skip the fourth floor entirely. I’ve seen it claimed that delivery rooms and NICUs get singled out for the same treatment, though I couldn’t track down a solid source for that specific detail, and I’ve since come across hospitals that placed their maternity ward on the fourth floor without a second thought. When we were hospital-shopping for my daughter’s birth back in 2020, I never noticed any of this; I was too busy comparing epidural policies and parking validation. It wasn’t until a friend was picking a maternity clinic last year, and I caught myself scrolling straight to the floor plan before I’d even read her reviews, that I realized I’d absorbed the habit without ever deciding to.
So it’s less a fixed rule than a tendency — stronger in hospitals overall, murkier once you zoom in on any one department. Nobody really argues about whether it’s rational; it’s just one of those things people default to when the stakes are already high enough.
Beyond the Building: License Plates and Envelope Money
Once you start looking, the number 4 disappears in places that have nothing to do with floors. Drivers who get assigned a plate with a repeated 4 — something like 4444 — will sometimes stall on registering the car, or drive out to a different regional office hoping for a different string of digits. I’ve never done this myself, but a coworker swore he knew someone who did, which is about the confidence level most of these habits run on: everyone’s heard of someone.
Cash gifts are stricter, and far more universal. I’ve already told you about the wedding envelope mix-up I made early on, handing over 50,000 won when the room’s going rate was clearly 100,000. What I left out of that story is the other rule baked into the same envelope: the amount should never land on 40,000 or 400,000 won. You go with an odd number instead — 30,000, 50,000, 70,000 — or round cleanly to a multiple of 100,000. Funeral cash, joeuigeum (조의금, funeral condolence money), follows the identical logic as chukuigeum (축의금, wedding congratulatory cash gift). My wife, who runs on gut feeling rather than spreadsheets for almost everything else, still rounds these envelopes on reflex, no calculation required.
| Where It Shows Up | What You’ll Actually See | How Strict Is It Today |
|---|---|---|
| Elevator panel | “F” printed instead of “4,” or the floor skipped entirely | Still near-universal in buildings from the 1990s–2010s |
| Apartment address | No building numbered 4, no unit ending in 4 | Common in older complexes, increasingly rare in new ones |
| License plates | Drivers avoid a repeated “4,” occasionally re-registering elsewhere | Anecdotal, but persistent |
| Wedding and funeral cash | Never 40,000 or 400,000 won — odd numbers or clean 10,000-won multiples instead | Nearly universal, holds across every generation |
| Names in red ink | Writing a living person’s name in red | Still visceral, even for people who call it silly |
| Army unit numbers | No 4th Corps, no 4th Division, no 4th Brigade | Permanent since 1948 — institutional, not a folk habit |
The Discovery I Didn’t Expect: My Own Unit Never Had a “4” Either
This is the one that got me.
I’ve written before about the yebigun (예비군, literally “reserve army”) notice that still lands in my mailbox every spring, years after discharge, so I already knew where my old paperwork was sitting in a drawer. After my daughter’s question, I dug out my jeonyeokjeung (전역증, discharge certificate) — the document that lists your division, regiment, and company by number — and just stared at it for a minute. No 4 in the division. No 4 in the regiment. Not even in the extension number I used to dial the duty office. I’d spent two years inside a numbering system and never once noticed what was missing from it.
The reason turns out to be specific, not vague folk custom passed down without an origin. In 1948, the 14th Regiment — a unit descended from a battalion of the original 4th Regiment — led the Yeosu-Suncheon Rebellion, one of the bloodiest uprisings in the young republic’s history. After that, the Army quietly retired “4” from its independent unit numbering altogether. It wasn’t a superstition people half-followed; it was a decision made once and never revisited. To this day there is no 4th Corps, no 4th Division, no 4th Brigade anywhere in the Republic of Korea Army. Every other write-up on this topic I’ve found covers the elevator and the wedding envelope. None of them mention the army — which is strange, because it’s the one version of this taboo that’s actually written into an institution’s org chart instead of just people’s habits.
The Cousin Taboo: Why You Never Write a Name in Red Ink
The same death-adjacent discomfort shows up in a completely different form: red ink. Write a living person’s name in red pen in Korea and you’ll usually get a reaction somewhere between a wince and a joke about wishing them dead. Two explanations get passed around for where this started. One traces it to Qin Shi Huang, China’s first emperor, who supposedly banned anyone but himself from writing in red. The other, more locally rooted, points to the Korean War, when the names of the dead were recorded in red ink on military registers and family records. Nobody I’ve asked can tell me which one is “true,” and honestly I don’t think it matters — both versions land on the same idea, that red ink and a living person’s name shouldn’t share the same page.
I test this on Korean coworkers sometimes, half out of curiosity. Every single one still flinches.
Why New Apartments Are Printing the “4” Again
Here’s the part that surprised me most: the superstition is losing ground fastest in exactly the place it used to be strongest. Apartment complexes built in the 1990s and early 2000s almost universally skip the 4th floor, the 4th building, or both — you’ll ride an elevator with a panel that reads 1, 2, 3, F, 5, like nothing’s missing. Walk into a building finished in the last few years, though, and there’s a decent chance you’ll find a plain, unapologetic “4” printed right where you’d expect it, sitting between 3 and 5 without any workaround at all.
Younger Koreans I’ve talked to about this tend to treat the old system as slightly embarrassing rather than respectful — one coworker in her twenties called it “very boomer,” no hint of irony in her voice. Developers have noticed the shift. Minimalist numbering, standardized floor plans, and a buyer base that increasingly finds the workaround more confusing than reassuring are pushing the plain number 4 back onto elevator panels, even as it stays firmly banned from wedding envelopes.
Quick Answers for Parents New to Korea
Should I worry if my kid’s daycare or pediatrician is on the 4th floor?
No. There’s no safety angle here at all — it’s a numbering habit, not a building code. Plenty of newer clinics and schools now sit on a completely ordinary 4th floor.
Is this only in old buildings, or do new places do it too?
Mostly old. As the section above lays out, recent construction is more likely to print a plain “4” than to skip it, outside of hospitals specifically.
Do young Koreans still take this seriously?
For elevators, less and less. For wedding and funeral cash specifically, yes — that one holds across every age group I’ve watched, my in-laws and my twenty-something coworkers alike.
I won’t lose sleep over which floor my daughter’s future apartment lands on. But I’ve quietly adopted one piece of this as my own personal rule: if I’m ever recommending a maternity clinic to a nervous expecting friend, I check the floor plan before I check the reviews. Most of these superstitions I can shrug off. That one, apparently, I’ve already let move in.