발 없는 말이 천리 간다 (Bal eomneun mari cheolli ganda)

Literally: Words without feet travel a thousand miles

Example: “비밀이라고 했는데 벌써 온 동네가 안다. 발 없는 말이 천리 간다더니.” — I said it was a secret, and the whole neighborhood already knows. Word gets around.

English equivalent: Word gets around

Origin: No specific documented coinage survives, but the phrase leans on a genuine piece of Korean wordplay: 말 (mal) means both "horse" and "speech," two entirely unrelated words that happen to sound identical, and the proverb builds its whole image on that coincidence. A horse (a real means of physical travel) has feet and legs to carry it somewhere; speech (mal in its other sense) has no feet at all, and yet somehow travels even faster and farther than any horse ever could — a thousand li, roughly the length of old Korea itself, in the time it takes news to pass from one mouth to the next. A related idea appears in the Analects of Confucius, in the phrase 사불급설 (a team of four horses can't catch up to the tongue), making the same essential point through a different image: once words are spoken, nothing physical can outrun them or call them back.