[16] Koreans primarily wrote using Literary Chinese alongside native phonetic writing systems that predate Hangul by hundreds of years, including Idu script, Hyangchal, Gugyeol and Gakpil.

[21] To promote literacy among the common people, the fourth king of the Joseon dynasty, Sejong the Great, personally created and promulgated a new alphabet.

[23] The project was completed sometime between December 1443 and January 1444, and described in a 1446 document titled Hunminjeongeum (The Proper Sounds for the Education of the People), after which the alphabet itself was originally named.

However, as Korean documents, history, literature and records throughout its history until the contemporary period were written primarily in Literary Chinese using Hanja as its primary script, a good working knowledge of Chinese characters especially in academia is still important for anyone who wishes to interpret and study older texts from Korea, or anyone who wishes to read scholarly texts in the humanities.

[46] Systems that employed Hangul letters with modified rules were attempted by linguists such as Hsu Tsao-te [zh] and Ang Ui-jin to transcribe Taiwanese Hokkien, a Sinitic language, but the usage of Chinese characters ultimately ended up being the most practical solution and was endorsed by the Ministry of Education of Taiwan.

There is some disagreement about exactly how many vowels are considered Korean's monophthongs;[citation needed] the largest inventory features ten, while some scholars[who?]

All digraphs and trigraphs, including the old diphthongs ㅐ and ㅔ, are placed after the simple vowels, again maintaining Choe's alphabetic order.

[61] In the Southern order, double letters are placed immediately after their single counterparts: The modern monophthongal vowels come first, with the derived forms interspersed according to their form: i is added first, then iotated, then iotated with added i. Diphthongs beginning with w are ordered according to their spelling, as ㅗ or ㅜ plus a second vowel, not as separate digraphs.

The order of the final letters is: Every syllable begins with a consonant (or the silent ㅇ) that is followed by a vowel (e.g. ㄷ + ㅏ = 다).

However, as the syllables 윽 euk, 읃 eut, and 읏 eut did not occur in Hanja, Choe gave those letters the modified names 기역 giyeok, 디귿 digeut, and 시옷 siot, using Hanja that did not fit the pattern (for 기역) or native Korean syllables (for 디귿 and 시옷).

[64] Originally, Choe gave ㅈ, ㅊ, ㅋ, ㅌ, ㅍ, and ㅎ the irregular one-syllable names of ji, chi, ḳi, ṭi, p̣i, and hi, because they should not be used as final consonants, as specified in Hunminjeongeum.

In the modern alphabet, an additional vertical stroke indicates i mutation, deriving ㅐ [ɛ], ㅚ [ø], and ㅟ [y] from ㅏ [a], ㅗ [o], and ㅜ [u].

In the Hunmin Jeong-eum Haerye account, the basic shapes iconically represent the articulations the tongue, palate, teeth, and throat take when making these sounds.

The Hunmin Jeong-eum Haerye states that the shapes of the non-dotted letters ㅡ, ㆍ, and ㅣ were chosen to represent the concepts of yin, yang, and mediation: Earth, Heaven, and Human.

A full understanding of what these horizontal and vertical groups had in common would require knowing the exact sound values these vowels had in the 15th century.

Thus, the original order of the vowels was: ㆍ ㅡ ㅣ ㅗ ㅏ ㅜ ㅓ ㅛ ㅑ ㅠ ㅕ.

The original order of the consonants in Hunminjeong'eum was: ㄱ ㅋ ㆁ ㄷ ㅌ ㄴ ㅂ ㅍ ㅁ ㅈ ㅊ ㅅ ㆆ ㅎ ㅇ ㄹ ㅿ.

Nothing would disturb me more, after this study is published, than to discover in a work on the history of writing a statement like the following: "According to recent investigations, the Korean alphabet was derived from the Mongol's phags-pa script.

[citation needed] The Hunmin Jeong-eum states that King Sejong adapted the 古篆 (gojeon, Gǔ Seal Script) in creating the Korean alphabet.

[citation needed] According to Ledyard, the five borrowed letters were graphically simplified, which allowed for consonant clusters and left room to add a stroke to derive the aspirate plosives, ㅋㅌㅍㅊ.

But in contrast to the traditional account, the non-plosives (ㆁ ㄴ ㅁ ㅅ) were derived by removing the top of the basic letters.

Also, the expected shape of ng (the short vertical line left by removing the top stroke of ㄱ) would have looked almost identical to the vowel ㅣ [i].

As a final piece of evidence, Ledyard notes that most of the borrowed Korean letters were simple geometric shapes, at least originally, but that ㄷ d [t] always had a small lip protruding from the upper left corner, just as the 'Phags-pa ꡊ d [t] did.

Consonant and vowel sequences such as ㅄ bs, ㅝ wo, or obsolete ㅵ bsd, ㆋ üye are written left to right.

Some recent fonts (for example Eun,[78] HY깊은샘물M,[citation needed] and UnJamo[citation needed]) move towards the European practice of letters whose relative size is fixed, and use whitespace to fill letter positions not used in a particular block, and away from the East Asian tradition of square block characters (方块字).

Due to liaison, heavy consonant assimilation, dialectal variants and other reasons, a Korean word can potentially be spelled in multiple ways.

[82] Like Japanese kana or Chinese characters, and unlike linear alphabets such as those derived from Latin, Korean orthography allows the reader to utilize both the horizontal and vertical visual fields.

[83] Since Korean syllables are represented both as collections of phonemes and as unique-looking graphs, they may allow for both visual and aural retrieval of words from the lexicon.

A sans-serif style with lines of equal width is popular with pencil and pen writing and is often the default typeface of Web browsers.

A minor advantage of this style is that it makes it easier to distinguish -eung from -ung even in small or untidy print, as the jongseong ieung (ㅇ) of such fonts usually lacks a serif that could be mistaken for the short vertical line of the letter ㅜ (u).