Korean ideophones exhibit vowel harmony in which an impressionistic distinction of vowel qualities known as ‘light’ and ‘dark’ is encoded. This distinction is based on consistent meanings for light and dark in that light ideophones typically presuppose small, light objects or positive events, whereas dark ideophones depict big, heavy objects or negative events. This study claims that the relationship between light/dark vowels and the meanings of Korean ideophones is gradient rather than categorical, and investigates the (lack of) phonological-semantic correspondence using a hand-coded 100-word corpus. A statistical analysis of type and token frequency of 100 4-syllable reduplicative ideophones shows a significant mismatch between vowel qualities and meanings in the token frequency of ideophones, in that phonologically light or dark ideophones are not necessarily semantically light or dark. The findings from this study indicate that the phonological and semantic components of Korean ideophones are only loosely related. (Yonsei University)