The most widely told story goes like this: at gold mines such as the one at Unsan in the late Korean Empire, whenever American operators struck a vein they would shout "No touch!" at the Korean laborers to keep them away. People supposedly misheard this as no-tochi → nodaji and came to think of it as meaning "a place where gold pours out." The tale resonates because it carries the pain of the nation's resources being seized by foreign powers. Honestly, though, this "No touch" theory is rejected by scholars. Linguists such as Jo Hang-beom and Kim Mu-rim flatly call it a groundless folk etymology. One scholarly alternative derives it from the Sino-Korean word nodu (露頭), the part of an ore vein exposed at the surface, but no account has been settled. The honest answer is simply "origin unknown."