Hangul

The Korean alphabet, known as Hangul in South Korea and as Chosŏn'gŭl/Chosŏn Muntcha in North Korea and China, is the alphabet that has been used to write the Korean language since the 15th century. It was created during the Joseon Dynasty in 1443 when Sejong Daewang became a King. Now, the alphabet is the official script of both South Korea and North Korea, and co-official in the Yanbian Korean Autonomous Prefecture of China's Jilin Province. In South Korea, Hangul is occasionally augmented by Chinese characters called Hanja; whereas in North Korea, Hanja fell completely out of use both officially and in everyday life.

In its classical and modern forms, the alphabet has 24 consonant and vowel letters. However, instead of being written sequentially like the letters of the Latin alphabet, 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 (see "South Korean order" below), though there are far fewer possible syllables allowed by Korean phonotactics, and not all phonotactically possible syllables occur in actual Korean words. For a phonological description, see Korean phonology.

Hangul (disambiguation)

Hangul, Chosŏn'gŭl or (Hunmin) Jeong-eum is the native alphabet of the Korean language.

Hangul may also refer to:

Hangul (word processor)

Hangul (also known as Hangul Word Processor or HWP) is a proprietary word processing application published by the South Korean company Hancom Inc.. Hangul's specialized support for the Korean written language has gained it widespread use in South Korea, especially by the government.

The software's name is derived from the Korean word Hangul (Korean: 한글, hangeul) for the alphabet used to write Korean.

Document formats

Hangul saves documents in HWP format, with the filename extension *.hwp. It is one of the standard document formats of the South Korean government. It is widely used for a number of reasons: Koreans require DTP level layout features to word processor, and its unique program can process Middle Korean.

HWP files, up to the versions created with Hangul '97, can be opened with OpenOffice.org (version 4.1.1 or earlier) or LibreOffice. However, files created with later editions of Hangul, including Hangul Wordian, Hangul 2002, Hangul 2005 and Hangul 2007 cannot be opened with OpenOffice or LibreOffice, due to the major changes in the document structure. These later versions of Hangul do not provide support for opening and saving of files in Microsoft Word format, but users are not necessarily aware of this. Consequently, Korean Hangul users may often send files to non-Koreans in .hwp format, not realizing the recipient will be unable to open such files.