Hangul syllable heok

It is one Hangul syllable; the word around it supplies meaning.

The block combines the initial consonant ㅎ, the vowel ㅓ, and the final consonant ㅋ; together, their Korean reading is romanized as heok. Read the whole word around it to see how this syllable functions.

Why does Hangul place letters in blocks?

A block groups letters into one Korean syllable.

Hangul developed in 15th-century Korea as an alphabetic way to write Korean speech more directly than Chinese characters could. It was announced around 1443–44 and formally promulgated in 1446 through Hunminjeongeum, a book that introduced the letters and explained how they work.

The letters, called jamo, are alphabetic sound parts arranged into compact syllable blocks. Those square blocks can resemble Chinese characters, but Hangul’s letters are arranged by sound, and their shapes were not directly modeled on Chinese ideographs.