Hangul letter ye

It supplies the ye vowel inside a Korean syllable.

In Korean, ㅖ fills the vowel position between an initial consonant and an optional final consonant. It is romanized as ye. Alone, it is a letter fragment, not a word.

The 1446 Hunminjeongeum Haerye, an explanatory work accompanying the publication of the Korean alphabet, records ㅖ among vowels formed by combining basic letters. Its form connects it to ㅕ and ㅣ. The writing system was recorded in 1443 and published in 1446 to make Korean easier to write than with Chinese characters. Unicode's later compatibility encoding records a computer form of the letter, not its origin.

How to type ㅖ

On the standard Korean layout, press Shift+P.

On the Dubeolsik keyboard, P types ㅔ and Shift+P types ㅖ. Switch your input method to Korean first; it combines the jamo you type into syllable blocks.

To form 예, type ㅇ followed by ㅖ. To enter ㅖ as a separate character, use a character map or an input method that inserts individual jamo.

Why does ㅖ become 예?

The input method is building a syllable block.

The loose ㅖ is a spacing compatibility jamo. Its conjoining counterpart, ᅨ, is the vowel form used in syllable shaping. An input method can join that vowel with an initial consonant, producing a syllable such as 예.

That change reflects how Hangul syllables are composed, not a change in meaning. The separate character ㅖ and the vowel inside 예 serve different roles in the text.