Morphological Passive -히-

Korean builds one kind of passive by dropping a tiny suffix into the middle of the verb, between the stem and the ending. -히- is the member of that suffix family (이/히/리/기) that attaches to transitive stems ending in an obstruent — ㄱ, ㄷ, ㅂ, or the cluster ㄺ. 닫다 "close" becomes 닫히다 "be closed"; 잡다 "catch" becomes 잡히다 "be caught"; 막다 "block" becomes 막히다 "be blocked." The subject of the passive is the thing the action happens to, and the doer, if mentioned at all, gets marked with 에게/한테. This page covers the -히- set, the aspiration that makes it sound so unlike its base verb, and the reason 막히다 in particular shows up everywhere in sentences English would never call passive.

How -히- makes a passive

Insert 히 between the stem and the ending: 닫 + 히 + 다 → 닫히다. The transitive verb's object is promoted to subject, and the sentence now reports something happening to that subject rather than something the subject does.

Compare active 제가 문을 닫았어요 ("I closed the door") with passive 문이 닫혔어요 ("the door got closed"). In the active sentence the door is the object (문을); in the passive it is the subject (문이), and the closer has vanished from view or been demoted. 바람에 ("by the wind") shows the non-volitional cause — an inanimate force takes 에, while a human agent would take 에게/한테.

The -히- inventory and its aspiration

The whole reason this suffix is spelled with ㅎ is that the ㅎ fuses with the stem's final consonant into an aspirated stop — exactly the sound-change you already know from 좋다 → [조타]. This is what makes the passives sound so different from their base verbs. The bracketed forms below are the pronunciation, and they are the point of the table.

The mechanism is uniform: stop + ㅎ → aspirated stop. ㄱ + ㅎ → ㅋ (먹히다 [머키다], 막히다 [마키다]); ㅂ + ㅎ → ㅍ (잡히다 [자피다], 밟히다 [발피다]); ㄷ + ㅎ → ㅌ, which then palatalizes before 이 to give ㅊ (닫히다 [다치다], 묻히다 [무치다]). In the ㄺ cluster the ㄹ stays and the ㄱ aspirates: 읽히다 [일키다]. Notice that the romanizations carry the fused sound — dachida, japida, ilkida — never the letter-by-letter spelling.

That last one shows a feature English lacks: the retained object. 발을 stays marked as an object even though the sentence is passive — literally "I got my foot stepped on." The subject (I, dropped) is the affected person, the foot is what actually got stepped on, and this "adversative" flavour — bad things happening to you — is very natural for the -히- passive.

막히다: the passive that English refuses to translate as passive

Every learner meets 막히다 first as "be blocked," and then spends months confused, because native speakers use it constantly in senses where English reaches for an ordinary intransitive verb, not a passive. There is no shortcut: learn these as fixed collocations, not as things you compute from "be blocked."

English says "the road is congested," "my nose is stuffed," "I'm speechless" — three unrelated idioms. Korean uses one verb, 막히다, because it construes all three as a passage being obstructed: the road, the nasal airway, the flow of speech. Once you see the metaphor, the collocations stop feeling random.

먹히다 and 읽히다: literal, idiomatic, and two-voiced

먹히다 literally means "be eaten," but colloquially it means "work, land, be accepted" — an argument or a tactic that "gets eaten" is one that succeeds.

읽히다 is doubly slippery. As a passive it means "be read" — often "read easily," a property of the text:

But the identical form 읽히다 is also the causative "make/let someone read" (선생님이 학생들에게 시를 읽혔어요 "the teacher had the students read a poem"). The verb never tells you which voice you're in — the particles do. This passive/causative overlap runs through the whole suffix system; it gets its own treatment on when passive and causative look identical.

Why this is a closed list, not a rule

You cannot freely coin -히- passives. Only a memorized set of transitive verbs takes the suffix passive at all, and even among ㄱ/ㄷ/ㅂ/ㄺ stems, some take 히 and some take a different member of the family — that is the whole business of which passive suffix a verb takes. Treat the seven verbs above as vocabulary. Everything else passivizes through the escape hatches 되다 and -아/어지다, covered on the selection page. For how the doer is marked when you do name it, see marking the agent in a passive.

Common Mistakes

1. Double-marking the passive with -지다. 닫히다 is already passive. Bolting -어지다 onto it (닫혀지다) stacks two passives — a very common error even among native writers, but still an error prescriptively.

2. Using the passive where you mean the active. If you close the door, you need active 닫다, not passive 닫히다.

3. Dropping the ㅎ and colliding with 다치다 "get hurt." In careless spelling, 닫혔어요 gets written 다쳤어요 — but those are different verbs that happen to be pronounced identically, [다처써요]. 닫혔어요 = "was closed"; 다쳤어요 = "got hurt."

4. Forcing English's "congested / stuffed" into a different verb. For a blocked road, a stuffed nose, or speechlessness, the natural verb is 막히다.

Key Takeaways

• -히- is the suffix passive for transitive stems ending in ㄱ / ㄷ / ㅂ / ㄺ: 닫히다, 잡히다, 먹히다, 막히다, 읽히다, 밟히다, 묻히다.
• Its signature is aspiration from ㅎ-fusion: ㄱ+ㅎ → ㅋ, ㅂ+ㅎ → ㅍ, ㄷ+ㅎ → ㅌ→ㅊ — hence 잡히다 [자피다], 막히다 [마키다], 닫히다 [다치다].
• 막히다 is high-frequency in senses English never calls passive — 길이 막히다 (congested), 코가 막히다 (stuffed), 말문이 막히다 (speechless). Learn them as collocations.
• Don't double-mark with -지다 (×닫혀지다), don't confuse the passive with the active 닫다, and mind the 닫혔어요 = 다쳤어요 homophone trap.