What is old or archaic Hangul?

Old Hangul refers to letters that were part of the original 1443 alphabet created under King Sejong but later fell out of use as the sounds they represented merged or disappeared. They appear in classical texts such as the Hunminjeongeum and in some dialect writing.

Araea, also called the lower dot, was a vowel pronounced as a low back sound between modern a and o. It merged into ㅏ and ㅡ by the eighteenth century but survives in Jeju dialect and in stylised names like Hangeul Day.

Why did these letters disappear?

Each obsolete jamo marked a distinction in pronunciation that Korean later lost. For example ㅿ stood for a voiced z that merged into ㅅ or silence, and ㆁ marked an initial ng that merged with the silent ieung ㅇ, so the separate letters became unnecessary.

Can I still type these characters?

Yes. They have Unicode code points in the Hangul Compatibility Jamo block, shown in the table, so they render in fonts that support old Hangul. They are used today mainly in scholarship, dictionaries, and dialect transcription rather than everyday writing.

No. The reference data is bundled with the page and the scanner runs entirely in your browser. Nothing you paste is sent to a server.

Korean Archaic/Old Hangul Reference

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Modern Korean uses 24 basic jamo, but the original alphabet included several more letters that have since become obsolete. This reference lists those archaic jamo with their sounds and code points, and can scan a passage to find them.

How it works

The reference covers the letters that were dropped from everyday Korean as their sounds merged or vanished:

ㆍ  araea          low back vowel between a and o (merged into ㅏ/ㅡ)
ㅿ  bansiot        voiced [z] (merged into ㅅ / zero)
ㆆ  yeorinhieut    light glottal [ʔ] onset
ㆁ  old ieung      initial velar nasal [ŋ] (merged into ㅇ)
ㅸ  kapyeoun bieup light b, a [β]/w-like fricative

The scanner walks your text character by character and reports any that belong to this obsolete set, with a count for each, so you can quickly tell whether a document uses pre-modern orthography.

Tips and notes

Most of these letters live in the Hangul Compatibility Jamo block (U+317F to U+318E), so they display correctly only in fonts that include old Hangul glyphs. You will meet them when reading the Hunminjeongeum, early Joseon-era printing, or Jeju-dialect transcription. For modern transcription, araea is normally replaced by ㅏ or ㅡ and old ieung by plain ㅇ.