What 독 means
독 can name a jar alone; compounds may carry other roots.
독 is a native Korean jar word, attested in Middle Korean, an older stage of the language; its origin remains unclear as of 2025. In 독약, the Chinese character 毒 means poison; 독서 uses 讀 for reading.
Hangul, the Korean writing system, was devised in 1443; its 1446 guide Hunminjeongeum (훈민정음) explains the letters. 독 combines ㄷ, ㅗ, ㄱ; Unicode also encodes it as the equivalent sequence 독.
What it means when someone sends it to you
3 readings김장독 in a message
A jar for storing kimchi.
독약 in a message
Poison, with Chinese character 毒.
독서 in a message
Reading books, with Chinese character 讀.
Questions people ask
1Does 독 mean “dog”?
No. It is romanized dok, with a short o and final k; “dog” is only the technical Unicode syllable label, not the animal word.
How to type 독
Windows (Word)
Alt+XType B3C5, then Alt+X to get 독.
Windows
Win+Rrun charmap for the full table, or use the emoji picker's Ω symbols tab (Win + .).
macOS
Control+Command+SpaceOpen the character viewer and search “hangul syllable dog”.
Linux
Ctrl+Shift+UType b3c5, then Enter or Space.
HTML
독CSS
\B3C5Codes and encoding1 code points
HTML decimal
독
HTML hex
독
CSS content
content: "\B3C5";
Each escape is closed by the next backslash; a trailing space is needed before a literal hex digit.
URL encoded
%EB%8F%85
1
On screen
1
Code points
1
JS .length
3
UTF-8 bytes
A visible symbol can contain several code points. JS .length counts UTF-16 units; UTF-8 counts bytes.