Hangul Syllables Explained

Rangestart:	AC00
Rangeend:	D7AF
Script1:	Hangul
Alphabets:	Hangul
2 0:	11172
Sources:	KS C 5601-1992
Note:	^[1] ^[2] 6,656 characters were present at U+3400..U+4DFF in Unicode 1.1, but were moved to their current locations with Unicode version 2.0, along with 4,516 additional characters.

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+1112: the 19 modern Hangul leading consonant jamos;
• one of U+1161–U+1175: the 21 modern Hangul vowel jamos;
• none, or one of U+11A8–U+11C2: the 27 modern Hangul trailing consonant jamos.

This block is encoded according to the canonically equivalent order of these (two or three) jamos (one in each subrange of jamos above) composing each syllable.

Note that a full Hangul syllable may include one of these characters but may be preceded by one or more leading consonant jamos, and followed by one or more trailing jamos (possibly preceded by one or more vowel jamos if the encoded syllable is composed by two jamos does not include any trailing consonant jamos). As well some Hangul syllables may not include any one of these precomposed character. But such extension of the Hangul script (which allows creating more complex syllables composed in the same square) is not very common in modern Korean.

Block

History

See also: Hangul (obsolete Unicode block). Encoding hangul syllables in Unicode was complicated by a reorganization of the code points:

• Unicode version 1.0.0 encoded 2,350 modern Korean hangul syllables from KS C 5601-1987 at U+3400–U+3D2D. This range is now part of CJK Unified Ideographs Extension A.
• Version 1.1 added 1,930 additional modern syllables from KS C 5657-1991 at U+3D2E–U+44B7, six modern syllables from GB 12052-89 at U+44B8–U+44BD, and the first 2,370 syllables that are not in the aforementioned three sets at U+44BE–U+4DFF. These collectively cover the remainder of what is now CJK Unified Ideographs Extension A and all of what is now Yijing Hexagram Symbols.
  • In addition, there were three errors in Unicode 1.1:^[3]
    • U+384E: 삤 in the Unicode Character Database, but 삣 in the Unicode 1.0 and ISO/IEC 10646-1:1993 code charts and per the source standard mappings
    • U+40BC: 삣 in the Unicode Character Database, but 삤 in the ISO/IEC 10646-1:1993 code charts and per the source standard mappings
    • U+436C: 콫 in the Unicode Character Database, but 콪 in the ISO/IEC 10646-1:1993 code charts and per the source standard mappings
• Version 2.0 added the 4,516 remaining possible syllables from KS C 5601-1992 and rearranged^{[4] [5]} all of the encoded syllables into the current U+AC00–U+D7AF range which allows algorithmic decomposition into individual jamo.

explains that this significant incompatible change was made on the assumption that no data or software using Unicode for Korean existed:

Subsequently, Unicode adopted an encoding stability policy which states that "Once a character is encoded, it will not be moved or removed".^[6]

The following Unicode-related documents record the purpose and process of defining specific characters in the Hangul Syllables block:

		Count	UTC ID	L2 ID	WG2 ID	Document
2.0	U+AC00..D7A3	11,172			N767
					N848
					N1158
					N1170
					N1198
					N1199
					N1203
					N1209
					txt)
					N1285
					doc)
					N1331
					N1332
					N1391
					N1353
					N1537
					N1561
					N1570
					N1603
					doc)
					N1942
					html, doc)
					N2018
					N2003
					N2119
					N2120
					N2564

Notes and References

1. Web site: Unicode character database. The Unicode Standard. 2023-07-26.
2. Web site: Enumerated Versions of The Unicode Standard. The Unicode Standard. 2023-07-26.
3. Web site: Informative document about three pre-Unicode-2.0 modern hangul syllables . Jaemin . Chung . 2017-03-29 .
4. Web site: Korean Hangul Encoding Conversion Table . K. D. . Chang . In Sook . Choi . Jung Ho . Kim . 1995-10-04 .
5. Web site: Notes and corrections for HANGUL.TXT . 2005-10-13 .
6. Web site: Unicode Character Encoding Stability Policies . Unicode Consortium . 2016-11-14 .