Reading

rak

(nak) when it starts a word — see below.

Also read (nak), (ak), (yo)

happy, glad; enjoyable; music

즐거울 락jeulgeoul rak

Every hanja has a two-part name in Korean: what it means, then how it's read. Here 즐거울 (jeulgeoul) is the Korean for happy, and (rak) is the reading. Say 즐거울 락 out loud and a Korean speaker knows which character you mean.

Strokes
15
Radical
⽊ 75
Beyond radical
11
Mandarin
Japanese on
gaku
Japanese kun
tanoshii

두음법칙 · initial sound rule

This one changes shape at the start of a word.

The dictionary reading is , but South Korean spelling writes when the character leads the word. Both are the same character; only the position differs.

Word-initial

樂曲 악곡 akgok樂士 악사 aksa樂團 악단 akdan

Elsewhere in the word

音樂 음악 eumak道樂 도락 dorak聲樂 성악 seongak

Vocabulary

Words that use

Tap one to see what it means and how it's built. Every character in these words has its own page here.

音樂음악eumak

Music

Character by character sound + happy

Same sound, different character

4 characters are all read (rak).

Korean has far more hanja than it has syllables, so one sound covers many characters. Write in hangul and it could be any of these — the hanja is what says which one you mean. That is why hanja still turn up in dictionaries, newspaper headlines and legal writing, where guessing from context is not good enough.

All of them are written in hangul.

Character data from the Unicode Unihan database. Korean reading, 훈음 and vocabulary from the libhangul hanja dictionary by Choe Hwanjin (BSD 3-Clause). English translations of whole words from kengdic (MPL 2.0 / LGPL 2.0+), a community dictionary — the occasional entry is wrong.Levels are derived, not official — they are not 한자능력검정시험 급수. The ordering combines Unihan’s kGradeLevel (the school year a character is introduced in Hong Kong, present on 1,539 of the 1,800), total stroke count, and how many national standards treat the character as core.