Usually risk assessment is performed for the safety of diverse industries though, many kinds of risks cannot be analyzed effectively by using classical probability models due to lack of experience data and impreciseness of human decision making. For these reasons, fuzzy risk assessment utilizing subjective judgment and experience of skillful experts has been considered as a solution. In this study, to comprehend the relationship between conventional fuzzy theory and human conceptual images on

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... sks, linguistic variables were reviewed with reference to fuzzy membership functions, especially in the Korean language. As interviewees, about a hundred people including students as well as safety engineers voluntarily participated. The research results showed that most people were in favor of adjective expressions decorated with adverbs rather than naive expressions such as "high" or "low", and that directly translated linguistic variables were not appropriate for the Korean people in risk assessment as far. Therefore, with consideration of the selection tendency by the Korean people in linguistic variables, it could be concluded that 5 level expressions would be most favorable for linguistic variables in risk assessments in Korea.