What 었 means
It usually marks past meaning inside a Korean verb.
In Korean, -었- follows a verb stem and takes a later ending: 먹었어 means “I ate.” In 15th-century Middle Korean, its ancestor -e is(i)- joined a connective meaning “and” to “exist,” describing a result or continuing state. It later developed past uses and uses that keep a result relevant; related Korean constructions -e iss- and -ko iss- preserve branches of that source.
It is a neutral verb ending; later endings carry the sentence’s politeness.
Alone, 었 is a fragment of a Korean word; read its surrounding form.
Part of the collection
Who writes 었
Loading…
Questions people ask
1Why does 었 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.
More like this
12
How to type or find 었
- Search it as
- eot · eoss · ess · -었- · 었어 · 었어요
- Shows up in
- Anything that takes text · its shape is whatever your font draws
었\C5C8Codes and encoding1 code points
A visible symbol can contain several code points. JS .length counts UTF-16 units; UTF-8 counts bytes.