Why did Koreans organize Hangul letters into square blocks?

While the Hangul writing system provides simple symbols for each phoneme that could be written sequentially, Koreans have historically preferred to group these symbols into square blocks.1

This practice was influenced by the Chinese tradition of writing, which uses characters that occupy a uniform square space. By organizing Hangul into these blocks, the script mirrors the visual structure of Chinese characters, which were the dominant form of writing in the region for centuries. In this arrangement, each block represents a syllable: the initial consonant (or a small circle if the syllable begins with a vowel) is placed first, followed by the vowel nucleus, and optionally a final consonant (patch’im) at the bottom.12