Korea's alphabet was invented on purpose, by a king

Almost every writing system on Earth grew gradually, one borrowed symbol at a time. Hangul is the great exception. In 1443, King Sejong of Korea’s Joseon dynasty had scholars create a brand-new alphabet for the Korean language, and in 1446 he promulgated it through a document called the Hunminjeongeum — “the correct sounds for the instruction of the people.”

The design is startlingly systematic. The five basic consonants are tiny diagrams of the mouth: the velar ㄱ depicts the back of the tongue raised toward the soft palate, ㄴ the tongue tip at the ridge, ㅁ the closed lips. Sounds that are related add strokes — adding a line turns a plain consonant into its aspirated cousin — making Hangul a rare “featural” alphabet where the very shape of a letter encodes how the sound is made. The vowels are built from three strokes loaded with cosmology: a dot for heaven, a horizontal line for earth, and a vertical line for the standing human.

Today the alphabet uses 24 letters (originally 28).

Not everyone welcomed it. The Confucian literati, who prized their hard-won command of Chinese characters, saw a threat. The scholar Choe Manri submitted a famous 1444 petition arguing the new script would cut Korea off from Chinese learning, and elites dismissed Hangul as eonmun, “vulgar script” fit only for women and commoners.

So it was sidelined for centuries, even banned outright under the tyrant Yeonsangun, and only became Korea’s dominant script in the 20th century. Today Hangeul Day is a national holiday, and UNESCO’s King Sejong Literacy Prize rewards the global fight against illiteracy.