What does 더위 mean?

ANSWER: higher?

This morning a Korean friend wrote on Facebook that she had recently hiked up 남한산성, an old fortress just south of Seoul, near Seongnam City (성남시). The Korean word she used for “hiked up” was 등반 (登攀), which is a Sino-Korean word that my Korean-English dictionary defines as “climb up,” “scale,” or “make the ascent of.” I knew that the 등 (登) in 등반 meant “to climb” because I knew the word 등산 (登山), which literally means “to climb (登) a mountain (山),” but I didn’t know the meaning of 반 (攀), so I looked it up in my Chinese character dictionary and found that its English meaning was “climb up,” even though they spelled it wrong, and that means that both 登 (등) and 攀(반) mean “to climb,” causing me to wonder what the difference was between the two characters. When I wonder something like that, I usually look at the Korean definitions to find the difference, and for 등(登) the Korean definition was 오르다 (to go up or climb), and for 반 (攀) it was 더위잡다, a new word for me, or maybe it is a word that I learned and then forgot.

My Korean-English dictionary defines 더위잡다 as “clutch (a thing)” or “to grasp at (a thing),” but why would that mean “to climb up”? Also, by itself, 잡다 means “to hold” or “to grasp,” so what is the difference between 잡다 and 더위잡다? My Korean-English dictionary says that 더위 means “the heat” or “hot weather,” but why would “grasping the heat” mean “to climb”? It would not make any sense, so there must be another meaning for 더위, right? Right.

더위잡다 is a pure-Korean word, and I have noticed that one characteristic of pure-Korean words is that they are often simple and quite logical, so could the 더위 in 더위잡다 simply mean “more (더) high (위)” or “higher"? That would mean that 더위잡다 would literally mean “to grasp higher,” which would be something you would do when climbing a steep hill, mountain, or cliff. In other words, when you climb a cliff, you do so by grabbing hold of something higher than you are and then pulling yourself up, and that is what 더위잡다 means, according to its Korean definition:

더위잡다 – [높은 데로 올라가려고] 무엇을 끌어잡다.

더위잡다 – to pull and grab hold of something [in order to climb to a higher place]

Here is my translation of the example sentence in the Korean definition of 다위잡다:

작은 소나무 뿌리를 더위잡고 간신히 벼랑을 기어올랐다.

[He] grabbed the root of a small pine tree and pulled [himself] up, barely making it up the cliff.

UPDATE: I just learned today that I had posted about 더위잡다 back in July 2016. You can see the post HERE.  This has happened before. I post about something that I have already posted about. My memory seems to be getting worse and worse.

From Dong-A's Prime Korean-English Dictionary

From 활용대옥편 (Chinese Character Dictionary)

From Dong-A's Prime Korean-English Dictionary

From 동아 새國語辭典