Reading

ran

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

Also read (nan)

railing, balustrade; animal pen

난간 란nangan ran

Every hanja has a two-part name in Korean: what it means, then how it's read. Here 난간 (nangan) is the Korean for railing, and (ran) is the reading. Say 난간 란 out loud and a Korean speaker knows which character you mean.

Strokes
21
Radical
⽊ 75
Beyond radical
17
Mandarin
lán
Japanese on
ran
Japanese kun
tesuri

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

欄外 난외 nanoe

Elsewhere in the word

高欄 고란 goran空欄 공란 gongnan句欄 구란 guran

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.

None of the words forms are in the English dictionary this section uses, so each one shows its literal composition instead. That usually means the character survives mainly in names, dates and classical text rather than in everyday Korean.

欄外난외nanoe

Literal reading, not a dictionary entry

railing + out

Same sound, different character

5 characters are all read (ran).

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.