Hangul Double-S Initial

It marks a tense “ss” sound at the start of a Korean syllable.

ᄊ is a leading jamo—a consonant building block, not a complete syllable. Add a vowel and it can join into a Hangul syllable block; by itself, it appears mainly in linguistic writing, older-spelling material, and work on fonts or text processing.

The recognizable ancestor of ᄊ appears in the 15th-century Hunminjeongeum tradition: ㅅ was doubled to form ㅆ. Hangul was created in 1443 because Chinese writing did not fit Korean well and many people could not use it to write their language. The 1446 explanatory book presented the new letters as easy to learn and usable across social classes.

Why does ᄊ look different from ㅆ?

ᄊ is the joining initial; ㅆ is its compatibility form.

They represent the same doubled-sios initial but serve different text representations. The leading form is designed to join a vowel inside a syllable; the compatibility form supports older display and code-page conventions. A font or text-processing system may therefore show ᄊ, ㅆ, or a completed syllable.

From the late 15th century through the 19th century, Korean spelling systems used ㅅ-series consonant clusters for tense sounds; in the 20th century, doubled-letter forms such as ㅆ entered standard systems. This is a change in spelling conventions, not evidence that ᄊ gained a new social meaning.

How do I type the exact character?

Shift+T starts the tense-s input on the standard South Korean two-set layout.

For the standalone leading form ᄊ, use a Unicode-aware character picker or enter U+110A in software that supports Unicode input. Korean input software may show compatibility form ㅆ or compose a syllable when you type a vowel, so Shift+T alone does not ensure this exact character.