A stemming algorithm for the Korean language free-text retrieval system has been designed and implemented. The algorithm contains three major parts and it operates iteratively ; firstly, stop-words are removed with a use of a stop-word list ; secondly, a basic removing procedure proceeds with a rule table 1, which contains the suffixes, the postpositional particles, and the optionally adopted symbols specifying an each stemming action ; thirdly, an extended stemming and rewriting procedures continue with a rule table 2, which are composed of th suffixes and the optionally combined symbols representing various actions depending upon the context-sensitive rules. A test was carried out to obtain an indication of how successful the algorithm was and to identify any minor changes in the algorithm for an enhanced one. As a result of it, 21.4 % compression is achieved and an error rate is 15.9%.