老 hanja, meaning old, read 로 (ro)
Reading
노 (no) when it starts a word (see below).
Also read 노 (no)
old, aged; experienced; Kangxi radical 125
늙을 로neulgeul ro
Every hanja has a two-part name in Korean: what it means, then how it's read. Here 늙을 (neulgeul) is the Korean for old, and 로 (ro) is the reading. Say 늙을 로 out loud and a Korean speaker knows which character you mean.
- Strokes
- 6
- Radical
- ⽼ 125
- Beyond radical
- 0
- Mandarin
- lǎo
- Japanese on
- rou
- Japanese kun
- oiru
두음법칙 · initial sound rule
This one changes shape at the start of a word.
The dictionary reading is 로, but South Korean spelling writes 노 when the character leads the word. Both are the same character; only the position differs.
Word-initial
노
老年 노년 nonyeon老母 노모 nomo老人 노인 noin
Elsewhere in the word
로
元老 원로 wollo長老 장로 jangno
Vocabulary
Words that use 老
Tap one to see what it means and how it's built. Every character in these words has its own page here.
Same sound, different character
6 characters are all read 로 (ro).
Korean has far more hanja than it has syllables, so one sound covers many characters. Write 로 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 로 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.