Hangul in Numbers

The royal annals record that in the twelfth month of 1443, King Sejong (세종) himself created 28 letters for writing Korean.

The original alphabet, named Hunminjeongeum (훈민정음), had 28 letters. Four have since fallen out of use.

Fourteen consonants and ten vowels. With 16 compound letters built from them, Hangul has 40 letters in all.

The basic consonants ㄱ, ㄴ, ㅁ, ㅅ and ㅇ picture the tongue, lips, teeth and throat as they make each sound. The other consonants are built by adding strokes to these five.

A dot for heaven (ㆍ), a flat line for earth (ㅡ) and an upright line for a person (ㅣ). All vowels are combinations of these three.

Letters are stacked into blocks, one per syllable: 19 initial consonants × 21 vowels × 28 endings (27 final consonants, or none). Unicode reserves exactly 11,172 code points for them, from 가 to 힣.

In the ninth month of 1446 the book Hunminjeongeum, which explains how and why each letter was made, was completed. Few writing systems have a known inventor, date and written rationale.

A national holiday celebrating the alphabet. The date comes from the preface of that 1446 book, dated to the first ten days of the ninth lunar month.

The Hunminjeongeum manuscript was inscribed on UNESCO's Memory of the World register in October 1997.

UNESCO established the King Sejong Literacy Prize to honor work that advances literacy around the world.

Today's Hangul orthography goes back to the unified spelling system drawn up by the Korean Language Society in 1933, partly revised in 1988.

Government-backed schools teaching Korean abroad: 142 in Asia, 59 in Europe, 34 in the Americas, 17 in Africa and 5 in Oceania, as listed in October 2026.

Headwords in the Standard Korean Language Dictionary (표준국어대사전) of the National Institute of Korean Language, as of October 2026.

Headwords in Urimalsaem (우리말샘), the institute's open dictionary that also covers dialects, new words and technical terms, as of October 2026.