年 hanja, meaning year, read 년 (nyeon)

Reading

년nyeon

연 (yeon) when it starts a word (see below).

Also read 연 (yeon)

year; new-years; person's age

해 년hae nyeon

Every hanja has a two-part name in Korean: what it means, then how it's read. Here 해 (hae) is the Korean for year, and 년 (nyeon) is the reading. Say 해 년 out loud and a Korean speaker knows which character you mean.

Strokes
6
Radical
⼲ 51
Beyond radical
3
Mandarin
nián
Japanese on
nen
Japanese kun
toshi

두음법칙 · initial sound rule

This one changes shape at the start of a word.

The dictionary reading is 년, but South Korean spelling writes 연 when the character leads the word. Both are the same character; only the position differs.

Word-initial

연

Elsewhere in the word

년

光年 광년 gwangnyeon近年 근년 geunnyeon今年 금년 geumnyeon

Vocabulary

Words that use 年

Tap one to see what it means and how it's built. Every character in these words has its own page here.

光年광년gwangnyeon

light year

Character by character light + year

In the grammar lessons

Seen in this lesson

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.