The title is written HAWWAH (夏渦) — Latin letters, then two Chinese characters. That combination is doing something Korean can do and English cannot.

Why Chinese characters turn up in Korean titles

Korean is written in hangul, but a large share of the vocabulary is Sino-Korean, and the underlying Chinese characters — hanja — are still taught and still used when a writer wants precision or weight. Here the two characters mean summer and whirlpool: the sound alone would be ambiguous in hangul, and the characters pin it down while adding a literary register that plain hangul would not carry. Album and track titles use hanja exactly this way, as a compression device. It is one of the reasons Korean song titles often lose something specific in translation.

About this release

Published 24 June 2026 through JYP Entertainment as dodree’s second digital single. The duo is credited as Na Yeongjoo and Lee Songhyun, and the video runs 3 minutes 01.

Watching from outside Korea

When a Korean title includes hanja, running the characters through a dictionary usually explains the song better than the official English title does.

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