Han'gŭl

Korean alphabet (Hangul or Chosŏn'gŭl)
The top reads Chosŏn'gŭl; the bottom, Hangul
Type	Featural
Languages	Korean
Creator	The court of King Sejong the Great
Time period	1443 to the present
Direction	Left-to-right
ISO 15924	Hang, 286
Unicode alias	Hangul
Unicode range	U+AC00–U+D7AF Hangul Syllables U+1100–U+11FF Hangul Jamo U+3130–U+318F Hangul Compatibility Jamo U+3200–U+32FF Enclosed CJK Letters and Months U+A960–U+A97F Hangul Jamo Extended-A U+D7B0–U+D7FF Hangul Jamo Extended-B U+FF00–U+FFEF Halfwidth and Fullwidth Forms

The Korean alphabet, known as Hangul in South Korea (also transcribed Hangeul) and as Chosŏn'gŭl/Chosŏn Muntcha in North Korea, is the alphabet that has been used to write the Korean language since the 15th century. It was created in 1443 under King Sejong the Great during the Joseon Dynasty. Now the alphabet is the official script of both South Korea and North Korea, and co-official in the Yanbian Korean Autonomous Prefecture and Changbai Korean Autonomous County of China's Jilin Province. In South Korea, primarily Hangul is used to write the Korean language, as using Hanja (Chinese characters) in typical Korean writing fell out of common usage during the late 1990s.

In its classical and modern forms, the alphabet has 19 consonant and 21 vowel letters. However, instead of being written sequentially like the letters of the Latin script, Hangul letters are grouped into blocks, such as 한 han, each of which transcribes a syllable. That is, although the syllable 한 han may look like a single character, it is actually composed of three letters: ㅎ h, ㅏ a, and ㄴ n. Each syllabic block consists of two to six letters, including at least one consonant and one vowel. These blocks are then arranged horizontally from left to right or vertically from top to bottom. Each Korean word consists of one or more syllables, hence one or more blocks. The number of mathematically possible distinct blocks is 11,172, though there are far fewer possible syllables allowed by Korean phonotactics, and not all phonotactically possible syllables occur in actual Korean words. Of the 11,172 possible Hangul syllables, the most frequent 256 have a cumulative frequency of 88.2%; with the top 512, it reaches 99.9%.