휴지

Etymology
probably a whose Middle Korean reading was in fact. If so, the current hanja would be an etymologically erroneous spelling.

The modern Standard Seoul form may be a result of hypercorrection provoked by less prestigious southern dialects that began to shift to  in the late sixteenth century: cf. anti-southern hypercorrection of to  in,.

As circumstantial evidence that 슈지 was original, Kim Han-byeol notes an early nineteenth-century corpus of personal letters whose writers—aristocrats hostile to colloquial linguistic innovations—purposely use anti-southern hypercorrected forms, e.g. instead of. They nonetheless use 슈지, however, which implies that it was not considered an innovation by these speakers.

휴지 is first attested in the 捷解新語 / 첩해신어 (), 1676, a text which uses both 휴지 and 슈지 apparently without any semantic distinction.

Noun

 * 1) waste paper
 * 2) tissue, toilet paper