Although a more modern, phonetic Korean alphabet (now known as Hangul) was created by a team of scholars in the 1440s C.E., Hangul did not come into widespread use until the late 19th and early 20th century. 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 Hanja. 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 characters is also helpful to understanding the etymology of Sinokorean words, and to enlarging one's Korean vocabulary. Hanja are not used to w