South Korea
Americannoun
noun
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During the 1980s, South Korea became a major industrial power in Asia.
Supported by the United States, South Korea was created in 1948 after American and Soviet occupation zones established at the end of World War II had divided Korea into north and south.
During the Korean War, noncommunist South Korea, aided by forces of the United Nations, and communist North Korea, aided by Chinese forces, fought from 1950 to 1953.
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Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.
The buzz: South Korea is one of five countries to have played in the past 11 World Cups — and it’s the only one of the five never to have won the tournament.
From Los Angeles Times • Jun. 10, 2026
Read: A massive 16% market swing just rocked South Korea over 24 hours.
From MarketWatch • Jun. 9, 2026
US chip titan Nvidia on Monday announced a large-scale data centre construction project in South Korea with SK Telecom, among a raft of other business deals in the country.
From Barron's • Jun. 8, 2026
Trading was briefly halted in South Korea as memory chip stocks tumbled.
From The Wall Street Journal • Jun. 8, 2026
By 2012, there were about twenty-four thousand defectors in South Korea.
From "Escape from Camp 14: One Man's Remarkable Odyssey from North Korea to Freedom in the West" by Blaine Harden
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Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023
Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.