Every letter is a picture of the mouth that makes it.
Type a name and this page turns it into a picture — but not an arbitrary one. Every shape comes from the Hunminjeongeum Haerye (1446), the document that explains how the Korean alphabet was designed. That explanation is unusual among writing systems: it states outright that the letters were drawn after the shape of the speech organs that produce them.
If you enter a name in the Latin alphabet, it is first approximated into Korean syllables, then decomposed into individual letters, then each letter is drawn as the organ it depicts.
Korean consonants are grouped by where in the mouth they are made. Each group has one base letter drawn from the organ itself, and the rest are made by adding strokes to that base — a stroke means a stronger sound.
| Sound class | Base letter | Shaped after | Element |
|---|---|---|---|
| Molar | ㄱ | the root of the tongue blocking the throat | Wood |
| Lingual | ㄴ | the tongue touching the upper gum | Fire |
| Labial | ㅁ | the shape of the mouth | Earth |
| Dental | ㅅ | the shape of the teeth | Metal |
| Guttural | ㅇ | the shape of the throat | Water |
So ㄱ is not an abstract sign. It is a picture of the back of the tongue rising to close the throat. ㅁ is a mouth seen from the front. ㅅ is a tooth. Adding a stroke to ㄱ gives ㅋ, which is the same place of articulation with more breath. This is why Korean letters can be learned in an afternoon: the system is not memorised, it is derived.
Vowels follow a different logic — not the body, but the cosmos. Three primitives combine to make every vowel:
ㅏ is a person with heaven to their right. ㅗ is heaven above earth. Every vowel in the alphabet is one of these combinations, which is why the marks in the drawing above are a dot, a line and an upright.
Before 1443 Korean was written with Chinese characters, which fit the language badly and took years to learn. The preface to the Hunminjeongeum says the king made the new letters because ordinary people could not put their meaning into writing, and he pitied them.
The design follows from that goal. A system meant for people without tutors has to be derivable from principles rather than memorised item by item — hence organs for consonants, cosmology for vowels, and strokes for strength. It is one of the very few writing systems whose inventor, date and reasoning are all documented.
Latin names are converted by rule, not by dictionary, so the result is an approximation. Korean has no separate f, v, or th, and does not allow most consonant clusters, so some sounds are mapped to the nearest available one. Silent letters are dropped where the rule can detect them. If the reading looks off, type the Korean spelling directly and it will be used as-is.