손절 (sonjeol) means cutting someone out of your life. The word is borrowed from stock trading, where it means selling at a loss to stop the bleeding, and the metaphor survives intact: the relationship is a bad position and you are closing it.
The full form is 손절매 (sonjeolmae), a loss-cut sale. 손 is loss, 절 is cutting, 매 is selling. Everyday speech dropped the last syllable.
Romanized sonjeol, occasionally sonjul. The 절 is a plain ㅈ, so the j is closer to English j than to ch.
Usage
손절했어 (sonjeolhaesseo) = I cut them off
The verb form. 손절하다.
손절당했어 (sonjeoldanghaesseo) = I got cut off
The passive, and much less commonly said out loud, for obvious reasons.
손절각 (sonjeol-gak)
The moment for cutting someone off has arrived. 각 is the suffix for a situation lining up.
손절 타이밍 (sonjeol taiming)
The right timing to end it.
이 주식 손절해야 하나
Should I sell this stock at a loss. The literal financial use, still fully alive.
What the metaphor smuggles in
The stock market framing does real work here, and it is why the word caught on.
Selling at a loss means admitting the investment was bad and accepting you will not recover what you put in. Applied to a person, 손절 carries that same accounting: you invested time in this friendship, it is not going to improve, and continuing costs more than quitting.
It also implies deliberation. 손절 is a decision, not a drift. Someone who says 손절했어 is describing a choice they made, often after weighing it for a while, which is a different thing from a friendship that quietly faded.
The coldness is intentional. Describing a person as a bad position is a hard thing to say, and people use the word precisely when they want that hardness available.
손절 vs 절교 vs 잠수
Three ways a Korean relationship ends, and they are not the same event.
절교 (jeolgyo) means formally breaking off a friendship. It is an older, heavier word with a schoolyard flavor, the kind of thing declared out loud. 절교하자 is a scene.
손절 is unilateral and usually silent. You stop replying, you stop showing up, and the other person works it out. No announcement.
잠수 (jamsu), literally diving underwater, means going dark. 잠수 타다 (jamsu tada) is the phrase, and it is the closest Korean equivalent to ghosting. The difference from 손절 is intent: 잠수 might be temporary and might be avoidance, while 손절 is a decision about the relationship.
So 절교 is announced, 손절 is decided, 잠수 is just absence.
Careful with this one
Do not use it about someone in front of them or in a group where it gets back to them. Naming a person as a 손절 target is a public verdict on their worth, and it is harsher in Korean than “I stopped talking to them” is in English.
Do not use it lightly about people in the same organization. In a workplace or a small community, saying you 손절했어 someone reads as declaring a faction, and other people will feel obliged to know about it.
Be aware there is a public-figure version too. 손절 gets used about brands dropping a scandal-hit celebrity, and about fans abandoning an artist. That usage is neutral reporting language and appears in news headlines, where the personal version does not.
Formal settings
The financial sense is standard vocabulary and belongs in any register. A brokerage report will use 손절매 without a second thought.
The relationship sense is casual speech. It would not appear in professional writing, and applied to a colleague in a work context it stops being slang and becomes a statement about how you intend to behave.
The neutral phrasings are 연락을 끊다 (yeollageul kkeunta, to cut off contact) and 거리를 두다 (georireul duda, to keep distance). The second one is much softer and is what people actually say when they want to describe the same thing without the edge.
If your own language has a financial metaphor for ending a friendship, I would be curious what it is. English has “cut losses” available and does not seem to use it this way, which makes me think the Korean version came from somewhere more specific than the metaphor being obvious.