This paper describes the development of speech databases for the Korean language which were constructed at Communications Research Laboratory in KAIST. The procedure and environment to construct the speech database are presented in detail, and the phonetic and linguistic properties of the databases are presented. the databases were intended for use in designing and evaluating speech recognition algorithms. The databases consist of five different sets of speech contents : trade-related continuous speech with 3,000 words, variable-length connected digits, phoneme-balanced 75 isolated words, 500 isolated Korean provincial names, and Korean A-set words.