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What does 연습생 (yeonseupsaeng) mean in K-pop?

Break 연습생 (yeonseupsaeng) apart and it reads literally as “practice-student”: 연습 means practice or rehearsal, and 생 is the Sino-Korean suffix for a pupil — the same 생 that ends 학생 (haksaeng, student). It’s the industry label for an aspiring K-pop idol signed to an agency and drilling in singing, dancing and foreign languages for years, sometimes close to a decade, before a debut is ever guaranteed.

On the Met Gala carpet, Stray Kids reach for it casually — “연습생 때 옷을 많이 입었거든요” (“I wore a lot of these clothes back in my trainee days”), where 때 attaches to a noun to mean “back when / during the time of.” Once you notice 생 (生, “student/born”), you start seeing it everywhere: 학생 (student), 신입생 (freshman, “newly-entering student”), even 선생님 (teacher, literally “one born earlier”). Someone who trained but never made it to a group is often described as 연습생 출신 — “of trainee origin.”