Here are the names for Go and they way they write them in the countries where the strongest players are.

Chinese		Wei-ch'i
Japanese		Igo
Korean		Baduk

Chinese is written using characters that come from pictures. There are thousands of them! The Japanese adopted the Chinese characters a long time ago. They've changed many of them a bit since then.

The Chinese character and the Japanese character are a bit similar, aren't they? The both have the part, but the Chinese put a on its left, while the Japanese put a underneath.

is a small form of the character for a tree, and is a small version of the character for a stone. Apparently, the hat-like thing at the top of is a hill and the square at the bottom is a stone that rolled down it!

So these Chinese and Japanese characters remind us of the wood of the Go board and the stone of the Go stones. The first character in each name means "surround", so they are calling Go the "surrounding game".

Korean writing is quite different. They use Chinese characters sometimes, for example in people's names, but mostly they use their own writing called Hangul. Hangul uses sounds, not pictures. Each block is a syllable, and is made up of smaller parts which stand for the sounds. Here are the ones in "baduk".

(p or b) + (a)	= (ba)
(t or d) + (u) + (k)	= (duk)

Oh, by the way, baduk rhymes with took, not with duck!

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Last update: 11th November 2004