Hangul medial vowel A

It is the conjoining Hangul vowel “a.” Hangul syllables combine jamo, or letter pieces: a leading consonant, a medial vowel, and sometimes a trailing consonant. The leading consonant ᄀ with ᅡ forms 가; adding the trailing consonant ᆫ makes 간. By itself, ᅡ is a syllable part, not a complete Korean word.

Hangul was developed under King Sejong and completed in 1443. The 1446 Hunminjeongeum publication included a guide explaining the alphabet’s design. It describes ㅏ as a vertical stroke ㅣ plus the dot ㆍ; vowels such as ㅑ, ㅓ, ㅗ, and ㅜ follow related patterns.

In modern Korean, this vowel belongs inside syllable blocks. In spellings from before 1933 and when transcribing regional speech, conjoining jamo can preserve older or more precise forms.

Why does ᅡ look different from ㅏ?

One joins a syllable; the other is a loose letter form. ᅡ is a conjoining jamo, designed to combine with the other pieces of a Hangul block. The related ㅏ is a compatibility jamo, a separate encoded form intended to display on its own. A Korean input method editor (IME) usually combines a typed vowel with its consonant into a syllable, so ordinary typing tends to produce 가 rather than ᅡ by itself.

If a tool substitutes ㅏ for ᅡ, the result may look right but has a different encoding. A Unicode character picker or code-point entry in an editor can insert the exact conjoining jamo.