The name "Jelly GGumi" was given to me by my mom, inspired by my teddy bear-like appearance, soft and squishy like jelly. "GGumi" was actually my prenatal nickname, and it comes from the Korean word for dream. This is the story of where it came from, and why a Korean family gives a baby a name months before the baby has a legal one.
What 꿈 (kkum) Means
꿈 (kkum) is the Korean word for dream. It covers both senses the English word does: the thing that happens while you are asleep, and the thing you spend years working towards. It comes from the verb 꾸다 (kkuda), which is what you do to a dream — Korean does not "have" a dream, it "dreams" one, using a separate verb for the act.
꾸미 (kkumi) is 꿈 with the affectionate ending -이 (-i) attached, which Korean adds freely to names and nouns to make them sound soft and familiar. When you attach it, the final ㅁ of 꿈 slides forward into the empty consonant slot of the next syllable, so 꿈이 is pronounced kku-mi rather than kkum-i. That is a standard feature of how Hangul syllable blocks work rather than anything unusual, and we have written about the blocks themselves in our introduction to Hangul.
So 꾸미 is not a random cute sound. It is "dream" made small and fond. Put the loanword 젤리 (jelli) in front of it and you get 젤리꾸미 — Jelly GGumi. My mom thought 꾸미 sounded like a word that brings to mind a cuddly little bear, so she decided to call me GGumi.
태명 (taemyeong): the Name Before the Name
The habit of naming a baby before birth is not a family quirk. It is a widely followed Korean custom with its own word: 태명 (taemyeong), from 태 (tae), meaning womb or unborn child, and 명 (myeong), meaning name. Almost every expecting Korean family picks one, usually within the first few months.
The reason it exists is practical as much as sentimental. A Korean child's legal name is registered after birth, and settling it often involves grandparents, careful thought about the written characters, and sometimes a professional naming service. That takes time, and none of it can sensibly happen before anyone has met the baby. Meanwhile there is a person to talk about, and "the baby" is a cold way to refer to someone you already think about every day. The 태명 fills that gap.
Most 태명 fall into two groups. Some are plain hopes: 튼튼이 (teunteuni) from 튼튼하다, meaning sturdy, is one of the most common in Korea, because a healthy baby is the only thing anyone actually asks for. Others are small food words chosen purely because they are affectionate — 콩 (kong), a bean, or 딸기 (ttalgi), a strawberry — often because that is genuinely what the first scan looked like. Ours belongs to the first group. The nickname gets used by everyone, including the clinic staff, and it is often written by hand on the ultrasound printouts.
The First Scan
The first time my mom saw me was when I was just a tiny little dot in her womb at five weeks. There is nothing recognisable at that stage. It is a small dark circle on a grey screen, and it is only meaningful because somebody tells you what it is. That is the point at which the name started being used out loud.
As the baby's space in her belly grew, my tiny form grew too, and I started to look more and more like a jelly bear.
Jelly GGumi at first
© jelly_ggumi
More bigger Jelly GGumi
© jelly_ggumi
More bigger Jelly GGumi
© jelly_ggumi
Korean prenatal care involves more frequent ultrasounds than many countries consider standard, which is one of the first things foreign parents in Korea tend to notice. It means the growth is documented in far more steps than a handful of milestone images, and it turns the scan photographs into something closer to a flip-book than a record.
Growing Out of the Frame
The scans that follow have their own rhythm. The early ones are about confirming that everything is where it should be. The middle ones are the detailed anatomy checks, and they are the appointments parents are quietly nervous about, because that is where anything unexpected would show up. By the later scans the concern has shifted to size and position, and the images stop being able to show the whole baby.
Eventually, I grew so big that I couldn't even fit into the ultrasound pictures anymore. That is a real turning point for the parents rather than a technical footnote. Up to then the baby is something you see whole, in one frame. After that you are looking at a head, or a spine, or a foot, and you are assembling the rest yourself. It is the point where the image stops explaining the baby and the name starts doing that work instead.
The Name on the Family Register
My legal name is INa Jeong. In Korean order that is 정 (Jeong), the family name, first, followed by the given name — the reverse of the English convention, which is why Korean names appear in two different orders depending on where they are written. 정 is one of the more common Korean surnames.
Korean given names are usually two syllables. Traditionally each syllable is tied to a Chinese character chosen for its meaning, and families sometimes share one character across every cousin in a generation, so the written name records where you sit in the family. Formal naming can go further still, with a 작명소 (jakmyeongso), a naming service, consulted for a combination considered auspicious.
Plenty of modern Korean parents step away from all of that and choose a name purely for how it sounds, which is what happened here. Two soft syllables, easy for a small child to say about herself, and — a consideration that would not have existed a generation ago — straightforward to romanise so that it survives being written in English.
Why We Started Writing This Down
Two reasons, and they turned out to be the same reason. The first is that we wanted a record. A growth diary is the sort of thing everyone means to keep and very few people actually do, and the difference between a folder of phone photographs and something written down is that only one of them explains itself later.
The second is that we kept answering the same questions. Friends and relatives outside Korea would ask about something that is completely ordinary here — why the baby had a name before she was born, why the first birthday is such a large occasion, why nobody worries about a parcel left in a hallway — and the honest answer usually needed a paragraph rather than a sentence. Most writing about Korea is either a tourist itinerary or an academic paper, and there is not much in between explaining how ordinary life actually works.
So the blog does both jobs. It is INa's diary, and it is the long-form answer to the questions we keep being asked. Her first birthday, which is the biggest occasion in a Korean child's early life, has its own post, and the general etiquette questions are collected in our overview of Korean cultural tips.
Still GGumi
What do you think of my growth journey? Do you think my mom picked the perfect name for me? The legal name is on the family register, but the one used at home is still 젤리꾸미, and that is the one that will end up in the stories she gets told about herself.
I'm going to be a dream come true for my parents. And someday, I'll be a dream for everyone who knows Jelly GGumi too.
