Korean romanization

Four ways to write Korean in Latin letters

Korean is written in Hangul, an alphabet whose letters are stacked into syllable blocks. Writing it in Latin letters is called romanization (romanisation in British spelling), and more than one system is accepted. The converter above supports four of them. They differ in what they set out to capture: the way a word is pronounced, or the way it is spelled, letter by letter.

• RR: The Revised Romanization of Korean is the official romanization of South Korea, issued by the Ministry of Culture and Tourism in 2000 (Notice No. 2000-8), and it spells words as they are pronounced.
• RR letters: The Revised Romanization of 2000 includes a letter-by-letter transliteration provision for cases where the Hangul spelling must be recoverable, writing each letter by its spelling rather than its sound.
• MR: McCune-Reischauer is a pronunciation-based romanization of Korean devised by George M. McCune and Edwin O. Reischauer in 1939, recognizable by its breves (ŏ, ŭ) and apostrophes for aspirated consonants.
• Yale: Yale romanization of Korean was devised by Samuel E. Martin in 1942 and is used mainly in linguistics, where it follows the Hangul spelling rather than the pronunciation.

For anything public, such as a place name, a sign, a menu or a document that has to match South Korean usage, Revised Romanization is the system to use. McCune-Reischauer is the one you meet in older books and maps and in a good deal of academic writing in English. Yale is a linguist's tool. The transliteration provision of the 2000 rules exists for the rare case where the Hangul spelling has to be recoverable from the Latin letters.

Hangul romanization charts

The charts below give the value of every Hangul letter in each system. They are generated from the same data the converter uses, so the chart and the tool cannot disagree. Read the consonant charts with one point in mind: in Revised Romanization and McCune-Reischauer a consonant can have two values, one at the start of a syllable and one at the end, because Korean pronounces it differently in those two places.

Vowels are the easy part. Revised Romanization writes them with plain letters and pairs such as eo and eu. McCune-Reischauer uses a breve for the same two sounds, ŏ and ŭ. Yale uses e and u and spells the rest by the letters of the Hangul. The letter-by-letter transliteration of the 2000 rules uses the same vowel values as Revised Romanization.

McCune-Reischauer writes the plain consonants as voiceless at the start of a word and voiced between voiced sounds, which is why the table has two columns for it. The letter-based systems below ignore pronunciation and give each letter one value at the start of a syllable and one at the end.

A syllable can end in two consonants. Before another consonant, or at the end of a word, only one of them is pronounced, and the pronunciation-based systems write only that one. The letter-based systems keep both.

Sound-change rules, with worked examples

Korean words are not always pronounced the way their letters suggest. Where two syllables meet, a final consonant can change the next one or be changed by it. Revised Romanization writes the result you hear, so the same letter can come out differently in different words. The sections below take the rules one at a time.

Each example is an official example from the 2000 rules or a standard spelling that the converter is tested against, and the romanization in each table is produced by the converter itself when this page is built.

Revised Romanization vs McCune-Reischauer vs Yale

All four systems agree on many words and part company on a few recurring points. The table runs the same words through each of them, and the list underneath names the differences you will notice most often.

• Aspirated consonants: Revised Romanization writes ㅋ, ㅌ, ㅍ and ㅊ as k, t, p and ch; McCune-Reischauer adds an apostrophe, k', t', p' and ch'; Yale writes kh, th, ph and ch.
• Plain consonants at the start of a word: Revised Romanization writes g, d, b and j; McCune-Reischauer writes k, t, p and ch, voiced between voiced sounds; Yale writes k, t, p and c.
• The vowels ㅓ and ㅡ: eo and eu in Revised Romanization, ŏ and ŭ in McCune-Reischauer, e and u in Yale.
• Sound changes: Revised Romanization and McCune-Reischauer write them; Yale and the letter-by-letter transliteration write the spelling.

In practice Revised Romanization and McCune-Reischauer are close cousins. Both write the pronunciation, both apply the sound changes, and the visible differences are mostly the apostrophes, the breves and the first consonant of a word: busan and pusan are the same city in two systems. Yale and the transliteration take the opposite approach. They follow the letters and ignore the pronunciation, which makes them dependable for reconstructing Hangul and less useful as a guide to how a word sounds.

Limits: what a converter cannot see

Some Korean sound changes depend on what a word means or how it was formed, and that information is not in the letters. The most important is n-insertion: in certain compounds an n sound is added before a syllable that starts with ya, yeo, yo, yu or i. A rule-based converter cannot tell those compounds apart from ordinary words, so it writes the regular form and flags the word in a note rather than guessing.

Verb forms are the second case. In 잡혀 the ㅂ and ㅎ merge into a single p, while in nouns the rules keep the h, and spelling alone does not say which kind of word you have typed. Hanja, the Chinese characters sometimes used in Korean, are left unchanged; convert them to Hangul first.

Two habits are left to you. The converter writes lower case unless names mode is on, so capitalize place names yourself (Busan, not busan). It also never applies a sound change across a space or a hyphen, so 백 마 stays baek ma while 백마 becomes baengma.

Korean names in Latin letters

The 2000 rules treat personal names separately. The family name comes first and is followed by a space; the given name is written as one word, a hyphen between its syllables is allowed, and sound changes between the syllables of a given name are not written. That last point matters. Typed as an ordinary word, 홍빛나 comes out as hongbinna; in names mode it is Hong Bitna.

Family names follow their own conventions. The rules leave their spelling to be settled separately, and in practice the most common ones keep customary forms: 김 is usually Kim rather than Gim, 이 is Lee or Yi rather than I, and 박 is Park rather than Bak. Names mode uses the customary spelling for common family names and shows the strict form in the syllable details.

McCune-Reischauer, as used in library catalogs and scholarship, writes the given name with a hyphen between its syllables and keeps the voicing, so 김민준 becomes Kim Min-jun.

If a name already has a spelling in a passport or another official document, use that spelling everywhere, even where it differs from the converter. A romanization standard tells you how to spell a name that has not been written down yet; it does not overrule one that is already on record. For a list of names, the batch tool under the converter takes one name per line and gives you a CSV file.

Frequently asked questions

Sources

Sources are given as plain references. The official examples in the 2000 rules, and the standard spellings for the other systems, are the test cases the converter is checked against.

• Revised Romanization of Korean: Ministry of Culture and Tourism Notice No. 2000-8 (2000)
• Revised Romanization, letter-by-letter transliteration: Ministry of Culture and Tourism Notice No. 2000-8 (2000), transliteration provision
• McCune-Reischauer: George M. McCune and Edwin O. Reischauer (1939)
• Yale romanization of Korean: Samuel E. Martin (1942)
• ALA-LC Romanization Tables, Korean, Library of Congress: McCune-Reischauer as applied in library cataloging

Rules last verified: October 26, 2026. How the romanization engines are checked.

Related

New to the subject? What is romanization explains the idea and how the standards for each script compare. For kana, the Japanese to romaji converter works the same way with Hepburn and Kunrei-shiki, and Russian, Ukrainian and other Cyrillic languages are on Cyrillic to Latin.