Hangul syllable bulh

Its meaning depends on the Korean word around it. Hangul builds syllable blocks from Jamo, its component letters; this block has initial ㅂ, vowel ㅜ and final cluster ㅀ.

Its canonical decomposition is ᄇ + ᅮ + ᆶ: separate Jamo for the initial consonant, vowel and final cluster. The ending is part of the spelling: changing ㅀ to ㄹ gives 불, while changing it to ㄺ gives 붉.

Where did Hangul come from?

King Sejong’s court created the script in 1443.

The writing system was called Hunminjeongeum; a guide explaining its letters was issued in 1446. It was designed to make Korean easier to read and write for people with limited access to Chinese-character literacy. Before Hangul, Idu used Chinese characters to write Korean, but it was difficult to express the language freely that way.

During the Joseon period, elites often ranked Hangul below Chinese-character writing, even as women and common people used it. The script became associated with Korean identity, and Hangul became its common name.

Why does 붏 look different?

Different fonts draw the same block differently. The Unicode chart’s sample glyph is not a required design, so fonts can change its proportions or stroke shapes without changing the character.

Unicode normalization has two useful forms here: NFD keeps the Jamo separate, while NFC commonly combines them into one precomposed block. These forms are canonically equivalent, but raw-string comparisons can distinguish their sequences.