漢字

Hanja is the Korean name for Chinese characters. The term is Sino-Korean, read from 漢字, the same graph pair that gives Mandarin hànzì and Japanese kanji. The borrowing is ancient, because the script technology itself entered the Korean peninsula centuries before the Common Era through commanderies, trade, scholarship, and statecraft. Long before Hangul, official writing in Korea depended on these graphs.

What matters is that the word is Korean even though the characters are Chinese. Hanja names not foreign writing in general, but the Chinese-character layer inside Korean literacy, law, Buddhism, historiography, and elite education. For centuries, Korean scholars wrote Classical Chinese and annotated Korean with hybrid systems. The script was imported. The intellectual life built around it was thoroughly local.

After King Sejong's court promulgated Hunminjeongeum in 1446, hanja did not disappear. It stayed in administration, scholarship, newspapers, personal names, and dictionaries for centuries. Modern nationalism later turned the relation between Hangul and hanja into an argument about identity, class, and memory. Script debates are never just about script.

Today hanja survives in South Korea in education, signage, personal names, and historical literacy. In North Korea, official usage largely vanished, but the historical layer cannot be wished away. The word now often marks distance, difficulty, or prestige. Yet it still names one of the deepest strata in Korean textual history.