The following tables of consonants and

vowels A vowel is a syllabic speech sound pronounced without any stricture in the vocal tract. Vowels are one of the two principal classes of speech sounds, the other being the consonant. Vowels vary in quality, in loudness and also in quantity (leng ...

(''jamo'') of the

Korean alphabet The Korean alphabet, known as Hangul, . Hangul may also be written as following South Korea's standard Romanization. ( ) in South Korea and Chosŏn'gŭl in North Korea, is the modern official writing system for the Korean language. The let ...

(''Hangul'') display (in blue) the basic forms in the first row and their derivatives in the following row(s). They are separated into tables of initials (leading consonants), vowels (medial) and finals (trailing consonants). The ''jamo'' shown below are individually

romanized Romanization or romanisation, in linguistics, is the conversion of text from a different writing system to the Roman (Latin) script, or a system for doing so. Methods of romanization include transliteration, for representing written text, and ...

according to the

Revised Romanization of Hangeul Revised Romanization of Korean () is the official Korean language romanization system in South Korea. It was developed by the National Academy of the Korean Language from 1995 and was released to the public on 7 July 2000 by South Korea's Min ...

(''RR Transliteration''), which is a system of

transliteration Transliteration is a type of conversion of a text from one writing system, script to another that involves swapping Letter (alphabet), letters (thus ''wikt:trans-#Prefix, trans-'' + ''wikt:littera#Latin, liter-'') in predictable ways, such as ...

rules between the Korean and

Roman Roman or Romans most often refers to: *Rome, the capital city of Italy *Ancient Rome, Roman civilization from 8th century BC to 5th century AD *Roman people, the people of ancient Rome *''Epistle to the Romans'', shortened to ''Romans'', a letter ...

alphabets, originating from

South Korea South Korea, officially the Republic of Korea (ROK), is a country in East Asia, constituting the southern part of the Korea, Korean Peninsula and sharing a Korean Demilitarized Zone, land border with North Korea. Its western border is formed ...

. However, the tables below are not sufficient for normal

transcription Transcription refers to the process of converting sounds (voice, music etc.) into letters or musical notes, or producing a copy of something in another medium, including: Genetics * Transcription (biology), the copying of DNA into RNA, the fir ...

of the

Korean language Korean ( South Korean: , ''hangugeo''; North Korean: , ''chosŏnmal'') is the native language for about 80 million people, mostly of Korean descent. It is the official and national language of both North Korea and South Korea (geographic ...

as the overarching ''Revised Romanization of Korean'' system takes contextual sound changes into account.

Leading consonants

Called ''choseong'', or "initials", there are 19 initial consonants, whereof one (ㅇ) is silent, and five (ㄲ, ㄸ, ㅃ, ㅆ, ㅉ) are doubled:

Medial vowels

Called ''jungseong'', or "vowels", there are 21 medial vowels:

Trailing consonants

Called ''jongseong'', or "finals", there are 27 final consonants; with the additional case of ''no final consonant'', there is a total of 28 possibilities:

Collation

Several collation sequences are used to order words (like alphabetical sorting). The North and South differ on (a) the treatment of composite jamo consonants in syllable-leading (''choseong'') and -trailing (''jongseong'') position, and (b) on the treatment of composite jamo vowels in syllable-medial (''jungseong'') position. This first sequence is official in South Korea (and is the basic binary order of codepoints in Unicode): Sequences of this second type are common in North Korea:

Letter names

Consonants

* Consonant names in the 15th century seem to have ended in a vowel (without adding the last consonant repeating a shortened version of the initial), judging from 1451 Hunmin Jeongeum Eonhae's forms such as "", which may have been pronounced ''geuneun''.

Vowels

The "names" of the vowels are given according to the sound they make (their pronunciation). To be technical, the silent consonant would be added before the sound (e.g., ㅏ becomes 아).

Hangul syllables

With 19 possible initial consonants, 21 possible medial (one- or two-letter) vowels, and 28 possible final consonants (of which one corresponds to the case of no final consonant), there are a total of

permutations In mathematics, a permutation of a set is, loosely speaking, an arrangement of its members into a sequence or linear order, or if the set is already ordered, a rearrangement of its elements. The word "permutation" also refers to the act or proc ...

of ''theoretically'' possible "Korean syllable letters" () which are contiguously encoded in the 11,172 Unicode code points from U+AC00 (Decimal: ) through U+D7A3 (Decimal: = 44,032 + 11,171) within the

Hangul Syllables Hangul Syllables is a Unicode block containing precomposed Hangul syllable blocks for modern Korean. The syllables can be directly mapped by algorithm to sequences of two or three characters in the Hangul Jamo Unicode block: * one of U+1100–U+ ...

Unicode block. However, the majority of these theoretically possible syllables do not correspond to syllables found in actual Korean words or proper names. Jump to tables with initial letter: