Korean Numbers Converter

Korean has two counting systems and picking the wrong one is the mistake every learner makes. Enter a number to get both — and to see which one you actually need.

Why there are two systems

Korean kept its own native numbers and also borrowed a full set from Chinese, and both survived. They did not merge — they divided the work. Native Korean numbers (하나, 둘, 셋) count things you can point at: people, objects, hours on the clock, your age. Sino-Korean numbers (일, 이, 삼) handle everything abstract or written down: money, dates, minutes, phone numbers, addresses, measurements, maths.

The split is not a style choice. Saying 삼 살 instead of 세 살 for "three years old" is not a slight accent — it is simply wrong, the way "three-th floor" is wrong in English. This is why a converter that only gives you one column is not much help.

The clock is where both systems meet

Telling the time in Korean uses both systems in a single phrase. The hour is native, the minute is Sino:

Once you notice this pattern it stops being confusing, but nothing about the written numerals warns you it is coming.

Why two spellings are shown

The tool gives you two lines, and they are for different jobs. The official romanization is Revised Romanization, the system on Korean road signs and passports. It is built for consistency, not for English readers, and if you pronounce it as English you will get it wrong — eo is not "ee-oh" and eu is not "you".

The say it line is a plain English respelling of the same sound. Read it as you would read English and you will be close. Two things worth knowing: Korean does not stress one syllable over another the way English does, so give each syllable roughly equal weight rather than leaning on one. And both 어 and 으 come out as "uh" here because English has no separate sound for the second one — it is the nearest honest approximation, not an exact match.

Native numbers change shape before counters

You almost never use a native number on its own. It comes attached to a counter — 개 for objects, 명 for people, 마리 for animals — and the first four numbers plus twenty change form when they do:

Everything else keeps its shape: 다섯 개, 열 개, 스물다섯 개. Note that only a bare 스물 becomes 스무 — twenty-one is 스물한, not 스무한.

Korean groups large numbers by ten thousand, not a thousand

English breaks big numbers every three digits: thousand, million, billion. Korean breaks them every four: 만 (10,000), 억 (100 million), 조 (1 trillion). This is why converting large sums in your head is so slow at first — the commas printed on the page are in the wrong places for the language.

One million is not a round word in Korean; it is 백만, "a hundred ten-thousands". A hundred million gets its own word, 억, which has no single-word English equivalent. Anyone who has tried to price something in won knows this gap well: 30,000 won is 삼만 원, and the useful mental anchor is that 만 means you shift four zeros, not three.

Two months are not spelled the way you would expect

Months are Sino-Korean plus 월, so January is 일월 and March is 삼월. Two of them break the pattern: June is 유월, not 육월, and October is 시월, not 십월. The final consonant was dropped because the regular forms were awkward to say. These two are simply memorised, and the converter above applies them automatically.

Related tools

See your own name written in Hangul with My Name in Korean, work out your age the Korean way with the Korean age calculator, and check clothing and shoe sizes with the Korean size converter.