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Naengmyeon combines two Sino-Korean morphemes: 냉 (naeng, from Chinese 冷 lěng, cold) and 면 (myeon, from Chinese 麵 miàn, noodle). The dish appears in Hong Seok-mo's 1849 almanac Dongguksesigi, which describes cold buckwheat noodles served in dongchimi brine — the liquid from radish water kimchi — as a midwinter food. Hong's reasoning was physiological: eating something cold on the coldest days was thought to strengthen the body by forcing it to generate internal heat.

Pyongyang naengmyeon became the prestige form of the dish. The noodles are made from buckwheat (meomil), which grows well in the cold highlands of what is now North Korea, and served in a chilled broth of beef or pheasant with thin-sliced beef, pickled radish, a halved hard-boiled egg, and drops of vinegar and mustard. Court records from the reign of King Gojong (r. 1863-1907) name naengmyeon among the king's preferred foods. A competing form, Hamhung naengmyeon, uses starchier potato-starch noodles and is served with raw spicy fish sauce rather than clear broth.

The Korean War (1950-1953) scattered naengmyeon across the south. Pyongyang and Hamhung residents who fled below the 38th parallel opened naengmyeon restaurants in Seoul and Busan, carrying recipes and regional identities with them. These restaurants became gathering points for the diaspora community and, by the 1960s, attracted non-refugee customers drawn by novelty. The north-south split in naengmyeon style maps closely onto the Cold War division of the peninsula.

By the 1980s, refrigeration had reversed naengmyeon's seasonal identity. A dish Hong Seok-mo described as winter food is now eaten primarily in summer, when Koreans consume an estimated 300 million bowls annually. The transformation tracks the spread of electric refrigerators into Korean households: once chilled broth could be produced year-round, the dish lost its original seasonal logic and found a new one. Koreans now associate naengmyeon with summer heat rather than winter cold.