Gayageum.

Shaun Brady’s NY Times story “She’s Blazing a Trail for a Traditional Korean Zither in Jazz” (archived), about “Seoul-born gayageum player DoYeon Kim,” of course interested me as a jazz fan, but I was also (more Hattically) intrigued by the word gayageum. Wikipedia says: The gayageum or kayagum (Korean: 가야금; Hanja: 伽倻琴) is a traditional Korean musical instrument. It is a plucked zither with 12 strings, though some more recent variants have 18, 21 or 25 strings. It is probably the best known traditional Korean musical instrument. It is based on the Chinese guzheng and is similar to the Japanese koto, Mongolian yatga, Vietnamese đàn tranh, Sundanese kacapi and Kazakh jetigen. Ah, I thought, the koto is familiar (and indeed it’s the only one of those terms that’s in the OED, dating from 1795: “The koto bears a strong resemblance to our dulcimers, having the number of strings, which are struck with sticks”). Wiktionary says: Literally “zither of Gaya,” referring to the legendary origin of…

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