How it began
Hangul was developed in 1443 by Sejong, fourth king of the Joseon dynasty, to improve literacy. The alphabet originally had 28 letters. In 1446 one of Sejong's decrees made it the official writing system for the Korean language under the name Hunminjeongeum, loosely translated as Proper Sounds to Instruct the People. Britannica notes that the development is traditionally ascribed to Sejong himself.
Before it existed
Before Hangul, Koreans wrote with Chinese characters, which were used across East Asia much as Latin was in medieval Europe. The characters did not match Korean speech and took long study to master. A system called Idu adapted Chinese characters to write Korean, but it still required knowledge of the characters. Commoners occupied with farming had little chance to learn them, and literacy was tied to the civil service examinations and so to the status of the elite.
How it works
Hangul today has 24 letters, 14 consonants and 10 vowels. Consonant shapes represent the position of the tongue, lips and other speech organs when the sound is made, and related sounds are formed by adding strokes to a basic letter. Vowels are built from lines and points that represent the Earth, the Sun and the human. Letters are grouped into square syllable blocks: an initial consonant, a vowel, and an optional final consonant at the bottom.
Who pushed back
Members of the court, including the official Choe Manri, strongly opposed the new script, and Sejong persisted in distributing it. Because of the influence of Confucianism and Chinese culture, Chinese characters remained the main writing system of the elite for about 500 more years, and Britannica states that Hangul was not used by scholars or upper-class Koreans until after 1945. For many years the script was known as Onmun, vernacular script.
What lasted
The explanatory text issued with the script claimed that a wise person could learn it in a morning and even a slow learner within ten days. Books in Hangul on farming and conduct spread among commoners, and popular novels in Korean encouraged publishing. Koreans began putting spaces between words in 1896, and both Koreas endorse the unified spelling standards proposed by the Korean Language Society in 1933.
Where it stands today
Hangul is the official writing system of South Korea and of North Korea, where it is called Choson muntcha, and it is used by Koreans abroad. South Korea marks Hangul Day on 9 October. The stroke-adding logic of the letters is also the basis of Korean keypad and keyboard layouts.
