Slug Generator

About Slug Generator

A slug is the part of a URL that names one page, like the last segment of /blog/how-to-brew-coffee. For English titles, making one is mostly lowercasing and replacing spaces with hyphens. For Korean, Japanese or accented Spanish titles there is a real choice to make: keep the native script, which browsers display nicely but actually transmit as percent-encoded UTF-8 bytes, or transliterate into Latin letters, which survives copy-paste everywhere but is less readable for native speakers.

By default this tool romanizes Hangul using South Korea's official Revised Romanization of Korean, strips diacritics, lowercases the result and collapses every run of non-letter, non-digit characters into a single hyphen. Turn romanization off and Hangul is kept as is.

What Google's documentation says, and doesn't

Google Search Central's URL structure guide recommends using “words in your audience's language in the URL (and, if applicable, transliterated words)”, and says characters outside the ASCII range should be percent-encoded. Its examples include a Japanese URL written in katakana. So a native-script slug is explicitly acceptable. The same page recommends hyphens rather than underscores to separate words, because underscores are commonly read as joining concepts together.

Google does not claim that either native script or transliteration ranks better, so this page won't either. The practical difference shows up when links are shared. A Korean slug such as 서울-맛집-추천-2026 looks fine in the address bar, but when copied it often becomes %EC%84%9C%EC%9A%B8-%EB%A7%9B%EC%A7%91-%EC%B6%94%EC%B2%9C-2026, 61 characters that are unreadable in an email or chat. The romanized seoul-matjip-chucheon-2026 stays at 26 characters wherever it goes.

Korean: pronunciation rules, not letter-by-letter

The first rule of the Revised Romanization is that Korean is romanized according to its standard pronunciation. Letters change when they meet, and the tool applies these sound changes within each word:

• Nasalization: 종로 → jongno, 국물 → gungmul, 먹는 → meongneun
• Liquidization: 신라 → silla, 광안리 → gwangalli (ㄹㄹ is written ll)
• Palatalization: 해돋이 → haedoji, 같이 → gachi
• Aspiration: a consonant next to ㅎ becomes aspirated, as in 좋고 → joko
• Linking: a final consonant moves to the next syllable, as in 먹어 → meogeo

Rules the tool deliberately skips

The official system writes 학여울 as Hangnyeoul because an extra ㄴ sound is inserted at the boundary between 학 and 여울. Detecting that boundary needs a dictionary, and guessing would be wrong more often than right, so the tool only applies linking and returns hagyeouryeok. The system also keeps ㅎ visible after ㄱ, ㄷ, ㅂ in nouns (묵호 Mukho, 집현전 Jiphyeonjeon); that requires knowing the part of speech, so the tool always applies the general aspiration rule. For place names and brand names, check the official English spelling and edit the slug by hand.

Japanese: nothing is transliterated

Romanization covers precomposed Hangul syllables only. Kana and kanji pass through unchanged, and the page warns you when that happens. 東京タワーの夜景 therefore stays 東京タワーの夜景, which percent-encodes to 72 characters (every kana or kanji is three UTF-8 bytes, nine characters once encoded). Automatic kanji romanization isn't reliable without a reading dictionary, since 東京 alone can be read more than one way in other contexts. If you want a Latin slug such as tokyo-tower-night-view, write it yourself; a translated slug is often more useful to readers than a romanized one anyway.

Spanish: diacritics are stripped, and that can change meaning

Accented Latin letters are decomposed with Unicode normalization and the accent marks removed, so ¿Cómo está el año? becomes como-esta-el-ano and Crème brûlée & Co. becomes creme-brulee-co. The inverted punctuation and the ampersand simply turn into separators. The catch is ñ: año (year) and ano (anus) are different words, and Spanish-speaking readers will notice. The Spanish ñ option handles this: As n keeps the old behavior (ano), As ny writes anyo, and Keep leaves the ñ in place (año, which percent-encodes to a%C3%B1o, only slightly longer) while still stripping the other accents. Rephrasing the slug around the word is the remaining alternative.

Worked examples

How to use it

1. Enter the title.
2. Choose the separator, lowercase, Korean romanization and an optional maximum length.
3. Copy the slug; double-check proper nouns against their official spelling.

Frequently asked questions