The Korean alphabet, known as Hangul internationally, Hangeul in South Korea, and Choson'gŭl in North Korea, has had multiple different orthographies. North Korea's current official orthography is the Compendium of Korean Language Norms [ko]. South Korea's current orthography is called "Hangeul Orthography" (한글 맞춤법).

Hangul is also used to transcribe other languages, especially Jeju and Cia-Cia. Orthographies for those languages are fairly similar to those for Korean, although they use one or more additional letters.

The depth of current Hangul orthographies is a subject of some disagreement. Many scholars argue current orthographies have a relatively shallow or transparent orthography, in that pronunciation generally closely corresponds to what is written. Their complexities are often the product of sound changes in the Korean language over time as well as morphophonemic orthographic practices (changing some spellings to reflect the function or meaning of some words). Some have described current orthographies as deep because of the morphophonemic practices.

In general, words are spelled as they sound in the respective standard Korean dialect, with most exceptions being due to morphophonemic word-formation rules. For example, 하늘 (haneul; 'sky') is spelled the way it is pronounced. However, 먹어 (meogeo; 'to eat') has this spelling despite being pronounced 머거. This is because it follows a word-formation rule that preserves the spellings of the stem verb 먹 and the particle 어. Other exceptions also exist, for example relating to pronunciation differences between stem words when pronounced alone and when attached to particles that begin with ㅇ.

Various shared words are spelled differently between North and South Korea. One significant reason for this is the differing standard dialects used. North Korea uses the Pyongan dialect and South Korea the Gyeonggi dialect. Differences arise due to various phonemena, including the initial sound rule, vowel harmony, local pronunciations, loanwords, tensing, compounds, morphological derivation, and the saisiot [ko] (epenthic ㅅ).

Hangul has used varying punctuation over time and now in both North and South Korea. Modern Hangul now uses a mix of modern Western, Korean, and East Asian punctuation.

South Korean punctuation largely follows Western practice, with some exceptions. Examples of exceptions include 『 』 or ≪ ≫; either of these sets of characters can be put around titles of works. Also, the tilde (~) can be used to indicate ranges of numbers or dates, as well as distances.

Spaces are used in Hangul. As with most other scripts, practices around spaces are somewhat arbitrary and ambiguous because it is difficult to define what a word is. Spacing is considered to be one of the most difficult aspects of Hangul orthography; many native Korean speakers do not use spaces properly or sometimes even at all. In general, spaces are inserted between lexical clusters called eojeol (어절; 語節). These lexical clusters can be subdivided into various other categories. Each eojeol can consist of a word and its subsequent corresponding particles or compounds. For example, "학교에 간다" consists of two eojeol separated by a space. The first is "학교" (lit. 'school') with an attached adpositional particle "에". The second is "간다", a conjugated verb.