Extract Korean initial consonants (chosung) from text, or play an interactive chosung guessing quiz. Free online tool.
Hangul (Korean script) combines consonants and vowels into syllable blocks. The initial consonant (chosung) is the first consonant in a syllable — for example, "한글" has the chosung "ㅎ" and "ㄱ". There are 19 possible initial consonants (ㄱ ㄲ ㄴ ㄷ ㄸ ㄹ ㅁ ㅂ ㅃ ㅅ ㅆ ㅇ ㅈ ㅉ ㅊ ㅋ ㅌ ㅍ ㅎ). Chosung extraction is widely used for SNS quizzes, search indexing, and alphabetical sorting.
A chosung quiz shows only the initial consonants of a word and asks you to guess the full word. This popular Korean internet culture originates from shorthand texting — e.g., "ㅂㄱ" for "배고파" (hungry). It's a fun educational activity for improving Korean vocabulary and linguistic intuition.
In Unicode, complete Hangul syllables are laid out sequentially from 0xAC00 (가) to 0xD7A3 (힣). By subtracting 0xAC00 from a syllable's code point and dividing by 588 (21 vowels × 28 final consonants), you get the chosung index. This elegant formula allows O(n) extraction without any dictionary lookup.
Chosung is the first (initial) consonant of a Korean syllable. For example, the chosung of "학교" are "ㅎ" and "ㄱ", and the chosung of "대한민국" are "ㄷ, ㅎ, ㅁ, ㄱ". There are 19 initial consonants in Hangul.
English letters and numbers are not Korean syllables, so they are not subject to chosung extraction. You can use the toggle options to keep or remove them from the output.
Yes, double consonants are extracted accurately. For example, "뚜벅뚜벅" extracts to "ㄸ, ㅂ, ㄸ, ㅂ".
Switch to Quiz Mode, then select a category (animals, foods, cities, etc.) and a difficulty level. You will see a chosung hint — type your guess and hit Check Answer. Use Next Question to continue.
Click the Copy button next to the output. The extracted chosung is copied to your clipboard and you can paste it anywhere with Ctrl+V (or Cmd+V on Mac).