Ttii (띠)

Your Korean Zodiac Animal Year

Overview

Tti (띠) is the Korean zodiac — the animal sign of your birth year drawn from a twelve-year cycle of Rat, Ox, Tiger, Rabbit, Dragon, Snake, Horse, Sheep, Monkey, Rooster, Dog, and Pig. Inherited from the East Asian sexagenary calendar, each animal carries a folk-personality, a fortune profile, and traditional rules of compatibility. Koreans ask what is your tti as a polite way to learn someone’s age, and the signs surface vividly at Seollal, the Lunar New Year. A Ttii reading names your animal and unpacks its temperament, luck, and best-matched partners.

Origin & history

The twelve-animal cycle (십이지, sibiji) entered the Korean peninsula with the Sinosphere’s sexagenary calendar more than a thousand years ago. Twelfth-century records and the guardian-animal statues ringing royal Silla tombs — such as the 8th-century tomb of King Gyeongdeok — show the zodiac animals already woven into Korean cosmology, ritual, and the reckoning of years.

Each year is governed by one of twelve animals paired with the ten heavenly stems, yielding the sixty-year gapja cycle that frames the traditional 60th-birthday celebration (hwangap). Through the Goryeo and Joseon eras the tti shaped name-giving, marriage matching, and the calendar; today it remains everyday knowledge, dramatised each Seollal as Korea welcomes the year of its incoming animal.

How it works

Your tti is fixed by the animal ruling your birth year on the lunar calendar, so births near Seollal may belong to the prior animal. Each sign carries a folk character — the diligent Ox, the bold Tiger, the lucky Dragon — plus compatibility triads and clashes used for matchmaking. The askTIAN API resolves a birth date to its correct zodiac animal across the lunar-new-year boundary and returns the animal’s name (Korean and Hanja), its personality profile, compatible and clashing signs, and a 0–100 fortune score.

Good for

Use cases

Animal Sign Profile

Find your zodiac animal and explore the folk-personality, strengths, and tendencies traditionally tied to it.

Yearly Fortune

See how the incoming animal of the new lunar year is said to favour or challenge your own sign.

Compatibility Match

Compare two birth years against traditional zodiac triads and clashes to gauge relationship harmony.

Seollal Reading

Celebrate the Lunar New Year with a reading themed to the year’s governing animal and what it heralds.

Key terms

Sibiji (십이지)
The twelve earthly branches and their animal emblems forming the repeating twelve-year zodiac cycle.
Gapja (갑자)
The sixty-year sexagenary cycle pairing the twelve animals with ten heavenly stems; completing it marks one’s hwangap.
Samhap (삼합)
The harmonious zodiac triads — sets of three animals four years apart held to be naturally compatible.
Seollal (설날)
The Korean Lunar New Year, the cultural moment when one’s tti shifts and the new animal year begins.

API

The askTIAN Ttii API resolves a birth date to its lunar-calendar zodiac animal and returns the animal’s name, personality profile, compatible and clashing signs, and a 0–100 fortune score.

Endpoint: POST /trpc/korean.ttii — 3 TIAN Points. See the API documentation and Playground.