Reading
이 (i) when it starts a word — see below.
Also read 이 (i)
unit of distance; village; lane; Kangxi radical 166
마을 리maeul ri
Every hanja has a two-part name in Korean: what it means, then how it's read. Here 마을 (maeul) is the Korean for unit of distance, and 리 (ri) is the reading. Say 마을 리 out loud and a Korean speaker knows which character you mean.
- Strokes
- 7
- Radical
- ⾥ 166
- Beyond radical
- 0
- Mandarin
- lǐ
- Japanese on
- ri
- Japanese kun
- sato
두음법칙 · initial sound rule
This one changes shape at the start of a word.
The dictionary reading is 리, but South Korean spelling writes 이 when the character leads the word. Both are the same character; only the position differs.
Word-initial
이
里正 이정 ijeong里甲 이갑 igap
Elsewhere in the word
리
海里 해리 haeri洞里 동리 dongni面里 면리 myeolli
Vocabulary
Words that use 里
Tap one to see what it means and how it's built. Every character in these words has its own page here.
knot, a nautical distance term
Character by character sea + unit of distance
Same sound, different character
10 characters are all read 리 (ri).
Korean has far more hanja than it has syllables, so one sound covers many characters. Write 리 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 리 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.