Why Wild Ginseng Gatherers Speak Their Own Language

Simmani, Korea's traditional wild ginseng gatherers, developed a private vocabulary used only in the mountains. The reasons behind it say a lot about how seriously the search was taken.

Simmani (심마니) — traditional gatherers who search Korea's mountains for wild ginseng — developed something unusual for an occupation: a private vocabulary, sanhun-mal (산꾼말) or simmani-mal, used only while on a search, and largely set aside once they came back down. The word 'simmani' itself is thought to derive from 'sim' (심), an old term for ginseng, plus a word for someone who searches — a name that identifies the person entirely by the search itself.

Words chosen to avoid offense, not just secrecy

Much of this vocabulary wasn't about hiding information from competitors, but about a real belief that plain, ordinary words could offend the mountain spirits believed to guard the ginseng, or startle the plant itself into hiding. Certain animals, certain ordinary objects, and even the act of finding ginseng were referred to indirectly, through substitute terms, rather than named plainly — a linguistic form of caution layered on top of a physically difficult search.

A search treated as a ritual, not just labor

Before entering the mountains, simmani traditionally observed specific customs — abstaining from certain foods or behaviors, offering prayers to the mountain spirit (산신) before a search began. None of this was incidental to the work; it reflected genuine reverence for how difficult, uncertain, and physically demanding the search for wild ginseng actually was, in mountains that had often already been searched by generations of gatherers before them.

What this tells us about the ginseng itself

This entire culture of ritual and coded language only makes sense against how rare and valuable a genuine wild find was — a scarcity we describe in more concrete, biological terms in our column on how slowly wild ginseng actually grows. The Donguibogam records ginseng's classical properties in plain clinical language; simmani culture records, in a completely different register, exactly how much effort and belief surrounded finding the plant in the first place.