-아/어지다 as Passive

Korean has three routes into the passive, and this page is about the one that never lets you down. The fused suffix passives (열리다, 보이다, 잡히다) are a closed, memorized club — most verbs are simply not members. So what do you do when you want to say "it was made," "it got decided," "the light was turned on," and the verb has no suffix passive? You reach for -아/어지다: attach 지다 to the verb's -아/어 form and you have a passive on demand. It is fully productive, it works on almost any transitive action verb, and it comes with a built-in bias toward result and agentlessness that maps beautifully onto the kinds of things Koreans actually say.

The formation: -아/어 form + 지다

Take the verb's -아/어 form — the exact vowel-harmony form you already use for the present -아/어요 — and glue 지다 onto it. All the harmony rules carry straight over: stems whose last vowel is ㅏ or ㅗ take -아지다, everything else takes -어지다, and 하다 becomes 해지다.

The present tense 져요 is just 지 + 어요 contracting (ㅣ + ㅓ → ㅕ), so if you can already say 만들어요 you can say 만들어져요. Notice that irregular stems irregularize before you add 지다: 짓다 loses its ㅅ (짓 → 지어), 끄다 drops its ㅡ (끄 → 꺼). Get the -아/어 form right first, and 지다 just rides along.

What the -아/어지다 passive is for: result, not the doer

Here is the reframing that makes this construction click for English speakers. English has one passive — "was built," "was decided" — and it happily lets you tack the agent back on: "was built by the Romans." Korean's -아/어지다 passive leans hard the other way. Its whole reason for existing is to answer "what happened to X?" rather than "who did it to X?" It foregrounds the result or change of state and typically leaves the agent unmentioned altogether. That is exactly why it pairs so naturally with the agentless, result-focused statements Korean loves.

In neither sentence do we say who decided the date or who built the bridge — and that is not an omission we are apologizing for, it is the point. If you do need to name the agent, Korean marks it with 에 의해 (formal) rather than a simple "by," but the -아/어지다 passive is happiest when no agent shows up at all. This agent-shyness is a deep feature of the language, covered in why Korean prefers the active.

There is also a genuinely resultative flavor here that plain "was X-ed" can miss. 문이 닫혀 있어요 uses the suffix passive to describe a resulting state; 나눠졌어요 emphasizes that the dividing has taken place and the pieces now exist. In the past tense especially, -아/어지다 reads as "has come to be X," a change that is now complete.

When to use -아/어지다 vs the suffix passive

This is the decision that trips people up, so hold onto one clean principle: if a verb already has a fused suffix passive, use it — do not build a 지다 passive on top. -아/어지다 is the fallback for verbs that lack a suffix passive, not a free alternative you can slap on anything.

Compare two "open" verbs. 열다 ("to open") has a suffix passive, 열리다. So "the door opened / was opened" is 문이 열렸어요 — never ×문이 열어졌어요. But 만들다 ("to make") has no suffix passive, so "it was made" can only be 만들어졌어요.

A few verbs genuinely allow both a suffix passive and a 지다 form with a shade of difference in meaning — that fine-grained sorting lives on choosing the passive suffix. But as a working rule for producing correct Korean: suffix passive first, -아/어지다 only when there isn't one.

The double passive — the error that defines this page

Now the mistake everyone makes, and the reason this construction needs its own warning label. Because -아/어지다 feels like "the passive marker," learners attach it to a stem that is already passive — a stem that already carries a suffix passive — producing a double passive. The three household examples are:

• 보이다 (already the passive of 보다) → ×보여지다 for 보이다
• 쓰이다 (already the passive of 쓰다) → ×쓰여지다 for 쓰이다
• 잊히다 (already the passive of 잊다) → ×잊혀지다 for 잊히다

In each case the suffix (이/히) has already done the passive work; adding 지다 stacks a second passive on top, which prescriptively is redundant and wrong. The correct forms are the plain suffix passives.

Honest note: the double passive you'll hear everywhere

Here is where you have to be told the truth rather than a tidy rule. 잊혀지다, 보여지다, and 쓰여지다 are officially wrong — and yet you will meet them constantly. The classic Korean ballad 잊혀진 계절 ("The Forgotten Season") has 잊혀진 right in its title; news anchors say 보여집니다; novelists write 쓰여진. The double passive is so widespread that many native speakers find the "correct" 잊힌, 보이는, 쓰인 sound oddly bare.

So what should you do? For the TOPIK exam, formal writing, and anywhere you are being judged, use the single passive (잊히다, 보이다, 쓰이다) — it is never wrong. But do not be confused when you hear the double form in a song or a drama; it is not a mistake you are mishearing, it is a genuine feature of colloquial and even literary Korean that the standard has not managed to stamp out. Recognizing it and choosing not to produce it is exactly the mark of a careful learner.

Common Mistakes

1. Stacking 지다 on a stem that already has a suffix passive. The classic double passive.

2. Building a 지다 passive on a verb that already has a suffix passive. Use the suffix form.

3. Attaching 지다 to the dictionary stem instead of the -아/어 form. It builds on 만들어, 지어 — never ×만들지다, ×짓지다.

4. Forgetting the irregular before 지다. 짓다 → 지어, 끄다 → 꺼; the irregular happens first.

Key Takeaways

• -아/어지다 attaches to an action verb's -아/어 form to make a productive, agentless passive/resultative: 만들어지다, 지어지다, 정해지다, 켜지다, 나눠지다.
• It answers "what happened to X?" and normally drops the agent — its natural habitat is the result-focused, doer-free statement.
• Use it only when the verb has no fused suffix passive. If a suffix passive exists (열리다, 보이다), use that — never build 지다 on top.
• The signature error is the double passive: ×보여지다 / ×쓰여지다 / ×잊혀지다 for 보이다 / 쓰이다 / 잊히다. Prescriptively wrong, extremely common in real speech and song — recognize it, don't produce it in formal Korean.