You received a file ending in .hwp or .hwpx from a Korean university, employer or government office, and nothing on your computer will open it.
🔒 This file never leaves your device — nothing is sent to a server
HWP is the document format of the word processor that South Korean offices standardised on decades ago. It handles Korean typography — vertical text, Korean numbering, dense official form layouts — in ways Word historically could not, so schools, universities, courts and government offices built their paperwork around it. That is why official Korean documents still arrive in this format.
Introduced in 2014, HWPX is registered as Korean national standard KS X 6101 under the name OWPML. Structurally it is a ZIP archive of XML files — the same idea as .docx. This makes it far easier for third-party software to read, which is why public institutions increasingly publish in it.
Renaming .hwpx to .hwp produces a broken file, and renaming either to .docx does nothing useful. The internal structures are genuinely different formats, not different labels.
Drop the file above
Both formats are detected automatically.
Read it, then export what you need
PDF to keep the layout, Word to edit, plain text to quote from.
No. Word has never supported the format.
An English edition exists. Whether it is worth installing for a single document is up to you.
PDF, if they can. Otherwise HWPX is easier to work with than HWP.