The very first consonant of Hangul, shaped like the root of the tongue touching the soft palate. King Sejong designed it to mirror the mouth's shape when producing the sound /g/ or /k/. Simple, elegant, foundational -- the cornerstone of an entire writing system born from geometry and phonetics.
A gentle curve representing the tip of the tongue touching the upper gum ridge. Nieun carries the sound /n/ and is one of the most frequently used consonants in Korean. Its shape is a visual echo of the tongue's position -- linguistics made visible in a single stroke.
A perfect square representing closed lips. Mieum produces the sound /m/, and its form is perhaps the most intuitively phonetic of all jamo: lips pressed together form a rectangle. This is Hangul's genius -- every letter is a diagram of the mouth making its sound.
Two strokes meeting at a peak, like a tiny roof or the shape of teeth coming together. Siot represents the sound /s/ and captures the way air hisses through a narrow gap between the teeth. A letter that looks exactly like what it sounds like.
A perfect circle representing the open throat. As an initial consonant, ieung is silent -- it holds space for vowels to shine. As a final consonant, it becomes the nasal /ng/. The circle is the void and the resonance, emptiness and fullness in a single round stroke.
The final consonant in the basic order, crowned with a horizontal stroke that represents a puff of breath escaping the throat. Hieut carries the sound /h/ and is often called the most expressive jamo -- it literally depicts air leaving the body. Breath made visible as line.
A vertical line with a short horizontal stroke to the right -- the bright, open vowel /a/. In Sejong's system, the vertical line represents a person standing, and the dot (now a stroke) represents the sun in the east. Vowels in Hangul encode cosmology: heaven, earth, and humanity.
The simplest vowel: a single vertical stroke representing a person standing upright. It produces the sound /i/ and is the foundational element from which all other vowels are built. In its stark verticality, it embodies the principle of humanity in the cosmological trinity of Hangul's design.
Click the blocks to see them bounce
.name