NewJeans fandom terms in Korean: Bunnies, Binky Bong, Tokki

Bunnies, written 버니즈 in Hangul, is NewJeans' official fandom name, announced on the group's 100th day after debut, in October 2022. NewJeans has used the rabbit as its symbol from the start, and the name was explained as the rabbit's friends. Our app translates fan messages from 28 languages into Korean, and before we touched anything, our pipeline wrote 버니즈 in only 11 of 24 test runs. The rest came back as 버니, 버니들 or 버니스, close to the name but not the one fans use. Once, for "a proud Bunny", it came back as 당근이, which is a carrot.

The fix had a trap in it, because bunny is an ordinary English word, and a letter to NewJeans is full of rabbits. So our rule keys on the capital letter: Bunnies with a capital B is the fandom. Our first drafts added a sentence or two explaining the lower-case word, and those extra sentences backfired. "I saw so many bunnies at the park" started coming back as 버니즈, four times out of four. What held was simpler: two plain example sentences in which bunny means the animal. Now, in sentences our rule never shows as examples, "thank you for loving Bunnies so much" comes back as 버니즈 every time, and "sending you lots of bunnies and hearts today" comes back with 토끼, a rabbit.

빙키봉, Binky Bong. A binky is the happy leap a rabbit makes, and Korean press has described the light stick as shaped after a jumping rabbit. Before we added a rule, our pipeline turned binky bong into 뿅봉 in 11 of 12 runs, and 뿅봉 is BLACKPINK's light stick. The twelfth run became 아미밤, which belongs to BTS. Writing it in capitals didn't help either: BINKY BONG came back as 뿅봉 four times out of four.

Fixing it showed us that the pull works in both directions. Our first version put the new 빙키봉 line at the very end of the fandom rules, below the line that says each light stick belongs to one group only. 빙키봉 then came back right, but "my bbyong bong is so pretty tonight", a sentence about BLACKPINK's light stick, started coming back as 빙키봉, four times out of four. Moving the new line up, above that ownership line, and limiting it to inputs that contain the word binky fixed both. Now "BINKY BONG lights up the whole stadium", a sentence our rule never shows, comes back as 빙키봉 every run, and 뿅봉 stays 뿅봉.

토끼 is simply the Korean word for rabbit, and it sits at the center of NewJeans' image. The group has been drawn as rabbits since debut, rabbits have appeared on their album covers, and 토끼 (Tokki) was given as a nickname alongside the fandom name. Because it is an everyday Korean word, it needs no special rule from us.

What we had to check was the other direction. After adding the Bunnies rule, we made sure ordinary rabbits stay rabbits: "your bunny ears in the photo were so cute" comes back as 토끼 귀 every run. One case still isn't right. A sentence about sleeping with a bunny plushie now usually comes back as 버니 인형, in 10 of our 14 runs, where before the fix it was almost always 토끼 인형, 7 times out of 8. It still reads as a rabbit plush, but it is a step back, and we would rather say so than hide it. If you mean the animal, write 토끼. The lines below do.