Hangul syllable Ggwas

It contributes one syllable; read the surrounding Korean spelling for the word.

Hangul was designed under King Sejong in 1443 to write spoken Korean with consonant and vowel letters. The 1446 book Hunminjeongeum (“Proper Sounds to Teach the People”) explains how they combine into syllable blocks.

Early Hangul printing used square syllable blocks, shaped in a writing culture influenced by Chinese characters. In early Hangul history, the script spread beyond elites through women in the royal court and Buddhist circles while officials and scholars still used Chinese characters. By the late Joseon period, people across ages and social ranks read and wrote Hangul. Later typefaces adapted to brush writing and horizontal layout, and some moved beyond the square.

What are the parts of 꽛?

Its parts are initial ㄲ, vowel ㅘ, and final ㅅ. These are compatibility jamo, the spaced forms used to show individual Hangul letters. Unicode’s conjoining-jamo sequence is 꽛: a leading consonant, vowel, and trailing consonant that a font lays out as one block.

The Johab set is Unicode’s full set of modern Hangul syllable blocks. It follows Korean character-encoding standard KS C 5601-1992 and includes the syllables in earlier Korean standards plus others; every modern block has an equivalent conjoining-jamo sequence.

Why does 꽛 split into jamo?

Unicode can store the same syllable as one block or separate jamo. NFC composes modern jamo into a precomposed block; NFD decomposes it into conjoining jamo. Both forms represent the same syllable, but an app or font with poor Hangul shaping may show the letters separately.