What 암 means
암’s meaning depends on its Korean word. The native prefix 암- marks the female of an animal or plant and contrasts with 수-. Hanja are Chinese characters used in Korean; the same reading appears in compounds for cancer, darkness, rock, or a hermitage. 암튼 shortens 아무튼 (“anyway”).
The native female prefix descends from Middle Korean, where an older form was written 아ᇡ and transcribed /amh/. Jilin leishi, a Chinese-language record dated 1103–1104, preserves an early transcription before this Hangul spelling.
Neutral inside a Korean word; alone, 암 is ambiguous.
A bare 암 does not always mean “cancer.”
Part of the collection
Who writes 암
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Related characters
2
아ᇡ Middle Korean written ancestor of native 암-.
Combination ideas
1Questions people ask
1Why does 암 show as a box on some devices?
Because that device's fonts have no glyph for it. The character is still correct and still copies correctly — the box is a missing glyph, not a broken character.
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12
How to type or find 암
- Also called
- am
- Search it as
- 암 · 암튼 · 암컷 · 암수 · 암 cancer
- Shows up in
- Anything that takes text · its shape is whatever your font draws
암\C554Codes and encoding1 code points
A visible symbol can contain several code points. JS .length counts UTF-16 units; UTF-8 counts bytes.