Reading
words, speech; speak, say; Kangxi radical 149
말씀 언malsseum eon
Every hanja has a two-part name in Korean: what it means, then how it's read. Here 말씀 (malsseum) is the Korean for words, and 언 (eon) is the reading. Say 말씀 언 out loud and a Korean speaker knows which character you mean.
- Strokes
- 7
- Radical
- ⾔ 149
- Beyond radical
- 0
- Mandarin
- yán
- Japanese on
- gen
- Japanese kun
- koto
Vocabulary
Words that use 言
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
2 characters are all read 언 (eon).
Korean has far more hanja than it has syllables, so one sound covers many characters. Write 언 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 언 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.