Hangul vowel yeo

It is the Korean yeo vowel, a y-glide into eo.

Korean romanization writes it as yeo. That spelling signals the glide; it is not an English word to pronounce letter by letter.

Inside a Korean syllable block, ㅕ is the medial vowel. The initial consonant sits to its left, and a final consonant, if present, sits below. You can see it in syllables such as 여 and 겨.

Why was ㅕ created?

It belongs to the original Hangeul alphabet, designed for writing Korean speech.

The first record of the 28-letter system dates to 1443. The explanatory Hunminjeongeum text, published in 1446, includes ㅕ among its original vowels. Hangeul gave Korean speakers a way to write their language with its own alphabet rather than relying on Chinese characters.

The design connects ㅕ to ㅓ: the y-vowel is formed by adding two short strokes to the base vowel. Korean romanization reflects the same relationship by writing the y-glide before the corresponding base vowel.

Why does ㅕ stay separate when I type it?

This standalone character is a compatibility jamo, which does not join on its own.

Compatibility jamo are spacing characters. In normal Korean text, an input method combines the corresponding vowel with an initial consonant to form a square syllable block. Unicode normalization forms NFKC or NFKD can map this compatibility form to a conjoining form.

The sound stays the same; the difference is how the character is encoded and composed.