Hangul syllable 힅

Enter ㅎ, ㅡ, ㅣ, then ㅌ in a Korean IME.

A Hangul jamo is a letter used to build a syllable block. The two middle keystrokes combine as vowel ㅢ, between initial consonant ㅎ and final consonant ㅌ.

Unicode also represents the syllable as the separated-letter sequence 힅. NFC, Unicode's standard form for combining Hangul parts, turns that sequence into precomposed 힅.

What does 힅 mean?

It represents a Korean syllable; its word meaning depends on context.

The block contains initial consonant ㅎ, vowel ㅢ, and final consonant ㅌ. By itself, it gives you a syllable; the Korean word around it supplies the word-level meaning.

Hangul was designed to write Korean more directly than Chinese-character writing and older methods that borrowed Chinese characters to spell Korean words and sounds. Its earliest secure record is from late 1443; its explanatory manuscript was completed in 1446. Some elite scholars resisted the script, but it later appeared in letters, Buddhist texts, novels, and official writing. A 2009 study proposed that the Mongolian Phags-pa script influenced some Hangul vowel shapes and ㅇ. That debated theory concerns the alphabet's design; it does not explain the origin of this individual syllable.