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First attested in the Jīlín lèishì (鷄林類事 / 계림유사), 1103, as Late Old Korean折. In the hangul script, first attested in the Gugeupbang eonhae (救急方諺解 / 구급방언해), 1466, as Middle Korean져〮 (Yale: cyé).
Once widely perceived as Sino-Korean, the spelling 箸 is in fact unetymological; and the word is of Native Korean origin as far as history is concerned.
Until the late 20th century—and as early as 1897 in James Scarth Gale's A Korean-English dictionary—dictionaries had mistakenly assigned the Chinese character 箸 for the word. The spelling was found often in literature as well, and is still occasionally presented as a folk etymology. However, this usage comes from a conflation with hanja箸(jeo, “chopsticks”), which now happens to be a perfect—albeit etymologically unrelated—semantic and phonetic match, erroneously assuming a Chinese provenance.
This fact can be gleaned from three related, but separate, observations:
1) It is difficult to see how the reconstructed Old Korean form *<cyel> based on the Jīlín lèishì transcription 折 (MC tsyet) could have derived from Middle Chinese箸(ɖɨʌH), with different consonantism and an evident final coda.
2) Further supporting this, the dialectal equivalent 절(jeol, “chopsticks”) preserves and confirms much of the original shape suggested by Jīlín lèishì, making its ultimate derivation from Middle Chinese箸(ɖɨʌH) even more unlikely.
3) The earliest written records show that the two were clearly distinguished. Both were unambiguously spelled differently in Middle Korean: the character was read as expected as 뎌〯(tyě), whereas the word itself was 져〮(cyé). Moreover, there are no known processes that could have derived the latter from the former before this point in the language. It was only during the Early Modern era when palatalization and loss of tone occurred that speakers began conflating the two.
In conclusion, 저(jeo) and 箸(jeo) are two different words and had historically been independent from each other. 저(jeo) is not derived from any known Chinese source and is very likely a descendant of the native Old Korean word for "chopsticks" recorded in Jīlín lèishì. It has only relatively recently become wrongly associated with 箸(jeo) in the standard dialect, where the two have coincidentally merged in sound.
True etymological use, as borrowed from Chinese, of 箸(jeo) in Korean is limited to a number of rare or archaic Sino-Korean compound words such as 시저(匙箸)(sijeo) or 비저(匕箸)(bijeo).
First attested in the Seokbo sangjeol (釋譜詳節 / 석보상절), 1447, as Middle Korean뎧 (Yale: tyèh). Nativisation of the Sino-Korean term 적 (笛, jeok), of which this is a doublet. Displaced by Korean피리(piri), a borrowing from Early Mandarin.