First attested in the 順天金氏墓出土簡札 / 순천김씨 묘 출토 간찰 ("Letters excavated from the grave of Lady Suncheon Kim"), c. 1585, as Middle Korean 슈지 (Yale: syuci), probably a nativisation of the Sino-Korean term 수지 (手紙, suji, “toilet paper; paper at hand”) whose Middle Korean reading was in fact 슈지 (Yale: syuci). 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 /hj-/ to /sj-/ in the late sixteenth century: cf. anti-southern hypercorrection of /t͡ɕi/ to /ki/ in 김치 (gimchi), 기와 (giwa).
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. 혯가리 (hyetgari) instead of 서까래 (seokkarae, “rafter”). 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 (Cheopae sineo), 1676, a text which uses both 휴지 and 슈지 apparently without any semantic distinction.
| Romanizations | |
|---|---|
| Revised Romanization? | hyuji |
| Revised Romanization (translit.)? | hyuji |
| McCune–Reischauer? | hyuji |
| Yale Romanization? | hyuci |