Korean Jamo Reference & Copy Tool - Alt Codes & Unicode

Korean is written in Hangul, an alphabet whose letters are grouped into square syllable blocks rather than written in a line. The individual letters are called jamo, and this table lists them: nineteen consonants and twenty-one vowels. A syllable block combines an initial consonant, a medial vowel and optionally a final consonant, so 한 is ㅎ plus ㅏ plus ㄴ assembled into one square.

The consonant design is systematic in a way few writing systems are. The basic shapes depict the position of the mouth and tongue: ㄱ shows the back of the tongue against the soft palate, ㄴ the tongue tip at the ridge behind the teeth, ㅁ the shape of the lips. Aspirated consonants add a stroke to the plain form — ㄱ becomes ㅋ, ㄷ becomes ㅌ, ㅂ becomes ㅍ — and tense consonants double it, giving ㄲ, ㄸ, ㅃ, ㅆ and ㅉ. The vowels are built from three elements representing heaven, earth and humanity, combined into the full set.

The three-way consonant distinction is the hardest part for learners and the most important for spelling. Plain, aspirated and tense consonants are three different phonemes, not variations in emphasis: 달 is moon, 탈 is a mask, and 딸 is daughter. English has nothing equivalent, and hearing the difference takes practice, but writing it is simply a matter of using the right jamo.

For text processing, the critical fact is that Korean has two Unicode representations. Precomposed syllable blocks occupy a block of 11,172 characters, so 한 is the single character U+D55C. The same syllable can also be stored as a sequence of individual jamo. They render identically and are different byte sequences, so search and comparison fail across them. Normalisation form NFC composes jamo into syllable blocks and is the standard fix. This matters more than usual on macOS, whose filesystem historically stored filenames in decomposed form, so Korean filenames copied between macOS and other systems frequently fail to match.

Typing Korean does not mean entering jamo one at a time from a table. The standard 2-Set (두벌식) layout puts consonants on the left hand and vowels on the right, and an IME assembles them into syllable blocks automatically as you type — pressing ㅎ, ㅏ, ㄴ produces 한 without any further action. The 3-Set (세벌식) layout separates initial, medial and final positions onto different keys and is faster for practised typists but far less common. On mobile, the Cheonjiin keypad builds vowels from the three basic strokes on a small keypad, while the Naratgeul layout uses the add-a-stroke logic of the consonants. The table above is most useful for discussing jamo individually or entering them outside a Korean input context.