What 친 means
친- marks kinship, closeness, or support for a side. In Korean, 친구 means “friend,” 친척 “relative,” and 친일 “pro-Japanese.” Alone, 친 is only a syllable, so read the whole word.
King Sejong devised the Hangul alphabet in 1443 to make Korean easier to write; the 1446 book Hunminjeongeum explained its principles. A Korean learning book, Hunmong Jahoe, recorded 親 with the reading 친 in 1527. Text normalization can split 친 into component letters; Unicode treats both forms as equivalent.
친 is neutral on its own; the following word decides whether it sounds familial or political.
Don't translate 친 alone as “friend.”
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Who writes 친
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Related characters
1
Combination ideas
3Questions people ask
1Why does 친 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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How to type or find 친
- Search it as
- 친 · 친 meaning · 친 in Korean · 친구 · 친척 · 친일 · 親
- Shows up in
- Anything that takes text · its shape is whatever your font draws
친\CE5CCodes and encoding1 code points
A visible symbol can contain several code points. JS .length counts UTF-16 units; UTF-8 counts bytes.