못생기다

Univerbation of 못 (mot, “poorly”) +‎ 생기다 (saenggida, “to appear, to emerge; (in past tense constructions) to appear, to look”).

• (SK Standard/Seoul) IPA^(key): ~
• Phonetic hangul:
  • Though still prescribed in Standard Korean, most speakers in both Koreas no longer distinguish vowel length.

못생기다 • (motsaenggida) (infinitive 못생겨 or 못생기어, sequential 못생기니)

1. (defective) to be ugly, unattractive

   Antonym: 잘생기다 (jalsaenggida, “to be handsome”)

   얼굴도 못생긴 게 / 왜 태어났니? ― Eolgul-do motsaenggin ge / wae taeeonanni? ― Your face is so ugly / Why were you born? (parody lyrics to "Happy Birthday to You")

The verb is defective due to the etymological semantics and primarily occurs in the morphological past tense (literally "to have emerged poorly" > "to be handsome"), e.g. 못생겼다 (motsaenggyeotda, “he is ugly”), 못생긴 (motsaenggin, “who is ugly”).

There is much dispute among linguists of Korean over whether it and similar stems should be categorized as verbs or adjectives. The National Institute of the Korean Language currently supports the argument that it is a verb as the morphological past tense has a stative sense pertaining to the present, which is true of certain verbs (e.g. 늙다 (neukda, “to age”) > 늙었다 (neulgeotda, “he is old”, literally “he has aged”)) but not generally of adjectives (e.g. 예쁘다 (yeppeuda, “to be pretty”) > 예뻤다 (yeppeotda, “she was pretty”)).