Date and time notation in South Korea
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
2026년 04월 27일
16:31
| Full date | 2026년 4월 27일 2026년 04월 27일 |
|---|---|
| All-numeric date | 2026-04-27 |
| Time | 오후 4:31 16:31 |
The most formal manner of expressing the full date and/or time in South Korea is to suffix each of the year, month, day, ante/post-meridiem indicator, hour, minute and second (in this order, i.e. with larger units first) with the corresponding unit and separating each with a space:[1]
- 년 (年; nyeon) for year;
- 월 (月; wol) for month;
- 일 (日; il) for day;
- 오전 (午前; ojeon) for a.m.; 오후 (午後; ohu) for p.m.;[a]
- 시 (時; si) for hour;
- 분 (分; bun) for minute; and
- 초 (秒; cho) for second.
For example, the ISO 8601 timestamp 1975-07-14 09:18:32 would be written as "1975년 7월 14일 오전 9시 18분 32초".
The same rules apply when expressing the date or the time alone, e.g., "1975년 7월 14일", "1975년 7월", "7월 14일", "14일 오전 9시 18분" and "오전 9시 18분 32초".
The national standard (KS X ISO8601, formerly KS X 1511) also recognizes the ISO-8601-compliant date/time format of YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM:SS, which is widely used in computing and on the Korean internet.
In written documents, the date form above (but not the time) is often abbreviated by replacing each unit suffix with a single period; for example, 2001년 11월 29일 would be abbreviated as "2001. 11. 29." (note the trailing period and intervening spaces as this is of importance).
