Hangul Syllable Ddyabs

Its parts spell a Korean syllable; surrounding text gives the word’s meaning.

Unicode’s decomposition gives three jamo—Hangul letter components that combine into syllables: initial ᄄ (ㄸ), vowel ᅣ (ㅑ), and final cluster ᆹ (ㅄ). The Unicode name describes that recipe; it is not a translation of a whole word.

An input method may store the sequence as one precomposed syllable block or as separate jamo; Unicode normalization can map equivalent sequences together. Fonts may arrange or size the components differently inside the square block.

Where did Hangul syllable blocks come from?

Hangul was designed to write Korean syllables by joining letter parts.

A late-1443 entry in the Veritable Records of Sejong, a royal court chronicle, dates Hangul’s creation. Hunminjeongeum, a book introducing the script, documented its principles, pronunciations, and the way syllable parts join in 1446.

Hangul gave Korean a writing system suited to the language, which had been written with Chinese characters. The Korean name 한글 emerged around 1913 and was common by 1927.