People joke that the name chonggak-gimchi must have something to do with a bachelor — a chonggak. But the word chonggak itself originally came from a hairstyle. Written with the Chinese characters 總角 ("gather" plus "horn"), it referred to hair parted and tied on both sides, or gathered back and braided up into horn-like tufts. In the old days, a boy not yet married did not wear the topknot but let his hair hang in such braids, so chonggak gradually came to mean an unmarried man. The order, then, is hairstyle first, bachelor second. Now, a small young radish has a slender, elongated root, and when held up with its greens still attached, it looked just like that braided, dangling chonggak hair. So the radish was called chonggak-mu, and the kimchi made from it became chonggak-gimchi.