Hanja
Although a phonetic Korean alphabet, now known as Chosŏn'gŭl or Hangul, had been created by Sejong the Great, it did not come into widespread official use until the late 19th and early 20th century. Thus, until that time it was necessary to be fluent in reading and writing Hanja in order to be literate in Korean, as the vast majority of Korean literature and most other Korean documents were written in Literary Chinese, using Hanja as its primary script. Today, a good working knowledge of Chinese characters is still important for anyone who wishes to study older texts (up to about the 1990s), or anyone who wishes to read scholarly texts in the humanities. Learning a certain number of Hanja is very helpful for understanding the etymology of Sino-Korean words, and for enlarging one's Korean vocabulary. Today, Hanja are not used to write native Korean words, which are always rendered in Hangul, and even words of Chinese origin—"Hanja-eo" ()—are written with the Hangul alphabet most of the time, with the corresponding Chinese character often written next to it in order to prevent confusion with other characters or words with the same phonetics.
Emoticon
In South Korea, emoticons use Korean Hangul letters, and the Western style is rarely used. The structures of Korean and Japanese emoticons are somewhat similar, but they have some differences. Korean style contains Korean jamo (letters) instead of other characters. There are countless number of emoticons that can be formed with such combinations of Korean jamo letters. Consonant jamos codice_108, codice_109 or codice_110 as the mouth/nose component and codice_111, codice_112 or codice_113 for the eyes. For example: codice_114, codice_115, codice_116 and codice_117. Faces such as codice_118, codice_119, codice_120 and codice_121, using quotation marks codice_66 and apostrophes codice_67 are also commonly used combinations. Vowel jamos such as ㅜ,ㅠ depict a crying face. Example: codice_124, codice_125 and codice_126 (same function as T in western style). Sometimes ㅡ (not an em-dash "—" but a vowel jamo), a comma or an underscore is added, and the two character sets can be mixed together, as in codice_127, codice_128, codice_129, codice_130, codice_131 and codice_132. Also, semicolons and carets are commonly used in Korean emoticons; semicolons mean sweating (embarrassed). If they are used with ㅡ or – they depict a bad feeling. Examples: codice_133, codice_134, codice_135, codice_136 and codice_137. However, codice_138 means smile (almost all people use this without distinction of sex or age). Others include: codice_139, codice_140, codice_141, codice_142.