Korean Lorem Ipsum Generator

About Korean (한국어)

Speakers: 80 million native speakers.
Where it's spoken: South Korea, North Korea, Korean diaspora (US, China, Japan, Russia, Central Asia).
Script: Hangul (한글) — created by King Sejong in 1443.
Direction: left-to-right (LTR).
Text expansion vs English: ~15% more compact.
Unique characters to verify: Hangul syllable blocks (가-힣), Korean punctuation similar to Latin.

A short history of the Hangul

Hangul is the only major writing system whose origin and date are precisely known. King Sejong the Great commissioned it in 1443 as a phonetic alphabet that could be learned in days, replacing the Chinese characters (hanja) that only educated elites could read. Each Hangul block represents one syllable, composed of 2–4 consonant and vowel letters arranged geometrically inside a square.

Modern Korean also occasionally uses hanja for disambiguation in academic and legal texts, but everyday writing — including all web content — is essentially 100% Hangul.

Korean typography for designers

Korean syllables fit into fixed-width blocks like Chinese characters, giving Korean text a similar grid-like rhythm. Unlike Chinese and Japanese, Korean uses spaces between words, so word-break behavior is similar to English. Punctuation follows Latin conventions (commas, periods, question marks).

The Korean web has rapidly modernised; Pretendard, an open-source font designed in 2021, has become the de-facto standard for Korean web design. It pairs cleanly with Latin text and supports both Hangul and basic English glyphs in one family.

Fonts that render Korean well

For web designs targeting Korean-language audiences, these fonts have proven Korean support:

• Noto Sans KR
• Pretendard
• Apple SD Gothic Neo
• Malgun Gothic
• Source Han Sans Korean

Always provide an explicit Korean-supporting font in your CSS font-family stack — relying on browser fallbacks produces inconsistent rendering across operating systems.

Common pitfalls in Korean design

• Mixing hanja and Hangul without typographic distinction — they're different scripts visually
• Using Latin fonts that have no Hangul glyphs — boxes appear
• Forgetting that Korean uses spaces — designs that ignore wrapping break
• Setting CSS letter-spacing for Korean without testing — interferes with the syllable block layout
• Using English emphasis conventions like italics — Korean uses bold or color instead

Localization tips for Korean

• South vs North Korean: subtly different vocabulary; for international design you almost always mean South Korean
• Family name comes first (e.g., 김민준 = Kim Min-jun); Western order is acceptable in international contexts
• Korean text is about 85% the length of equivalent English
• Date format: 2024년 3월 15일 or 2024-03-15
• Currency: ₩ (won) — never assume USD

Why classic Latin Lorem Ipsum doesn't work for Korean

The classic Lorem Ipsum is a corrupted Latin passage from Cicero. It's perfect for Latin-script designs because it produces letter and word lengths that look like real text. But for Korean designs, classic Latin lorem ipsum is the wrong choice:

• It uses Latin script, so it can't reveal Korean font rendering issues.
• It doesn't have the character widths and word lengths typical of real Korean.
• Designers shown Latin placeholder cannot evaluate the visual rhythm of Korean on the page.
• Stakeholder reviews on Latin lorem ipsum miss layout problems that only surface with native script.

The Korean placeholder above uses real Korean words and characters, so what you see in the mockup is what you'll see in production.

Lorem Ipsum in other languages

Designing for multiple locales? We have placeholder generators for 19 other languages: