What 말 means
Both meanings are valid; nearby words settle it. Korean dictionaries list speech and horse as separate meanings of 말. If it arrives alone, ask for the surrounding phrase.
The 1446 preface to Hunminjeongeum, the book that introduced Hangul, opens “나랏말싸미 중국에 달아” (“Our country's language differs from China's”); 말 there means “language.” Hangul was created in 1443 to make Korean more accessible than writing it with Chinese characters. Its syllable blocks combine letters called jamo.
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Who writes 말
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What it means when someone sends it to you
2 readingsSpeaking: say or tell.
Related characters
3
Questions people ask
1Why does 말 split into jamo?
Unicode normalization can do that: NFD separates 말 into three jamo; NFC recombines them as one syllable. The stored characters differ, though a font may still display the decomposed form as a joined syllable.
More like this
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How to type or find 말
- Also called
- mal
- Search it as
- 말 뜻 · 말하다 · 말 타다
- Shows up in
- Anything that takes text · its shape is whatever your font draws
말\B9D0Codes and encoding1 code points
A visible symbol can contain several code points. JS .length counts UTF-16 units; UTF-8 counts bytes.