Reading

ryeol

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

Also read (yeol)

fiery, violent, vehement, ardent

세찰 렬sechal ryeol

Every hanja has a two-part name in Korean: what it means, then how it's read. Here 세찰 (sechal) is the Korean for fiery, and (ryeol) is the reading. Say 세찰 렬 out loud and a Korean speaker knows which character you mean.

Strokes
10
Radical
⽕ 86
Beyond radical
6
Mandarin
liè
Japanese on
retsu
Japanese kun
hageshii

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

烈光 열광 yeolgwang烈日 열일 yeoril烈風 열풍 yeolpung

Elsewhere in the word

猛烈 맹렬 maengnyeol激烈 격렬 gyeongnyeol熱烈 열렬 yeollyeol

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.

猛烈맹렬maengnyeol

fierceness, impetusosity

Character by character violent + fiery

Same sound, different character

4 characters are all read (ryeol).

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.