Hangul syllable 찴

It spells one spoken syllable. The block combines ㅊ, vowel ㅏ, and final cluster ㄽ (ㄹ + ㅅ). In standard Korean, ㄽ sounds like a final “l” at a word end or before another consonant; the isolated block sounds roughly like “chal,” with “ch” as in “chat.”

Hangul was designed to write Korean speech, whose sounds differ from Chinese, with alphabetic letters grouped into syllable blocks. Its earliest record is a 1443 entry in the Sejong Sillok, a royal court chronicle; the explanatory book Hunminjeongeum appeared in 1446.