Hangul syllable 흾

Its meaning depends on the Korean word around it. In a Korean word, 흾 contributes one syllable rather than standing for a whole idea. Its parts are initial ㅎ, vowel ㅢ, and final consonant pair ㅄ.

On September 14, 2026, the National Institute of Korean Language's dictionary search had no entry for 흾 as a standalone Korean word.

Why does Hangul put syllables in blocks?

Each block gathers the sounds of one syllable. The earliest record of Hangul's creation is a 1443 entry in the Sejong Shilok, a court chronicle; the Hunminjeongeum, a book explaining the writing system, was published in 1446. Hangul was designed to write Korean speech with alphabetic sounds rather than make Korean fit Chinese characters.

Printing with reusable type gave way to digital text, but the syllable's role stayed the same: Unicode can store it as one precomposed block or as jamo that recombine on screen. Some accounts propose that Hangul's square layout drew on Phags-pa, a square script promulgated for the Yuan empire in 1269; the influence is possible, not established.