Variant character
Differences for the same Unicode character in regional versions of Source Han Sans
Chinese name
Traditional Chinese	異體字
Simplified Chinese	异体字
Literal meaning	different form character
Transcriptions Standard Mandarin Hanyu Pinyin yìtǐzì Yue: Cantonese Yale Romanization yihtáijih Jyutping ji6tai2zi6
Alternative Chinese name
Traditional Chinese	又體
Simplified Chinese	又体
Literal meaning	also form
Transcriptions Standard Mandarin Hanyu Pinyin yòutǐ Yue: Cantonese Yale Romanization yauhtái Jyutping jau6 tai2
Second alternative Chinese name
Traditional Chinese	或體
Simplified Chinese	或体
Literal meaning	or form
Transcriptions Standard Mandarin Hanyu Pinyin huòtǐ Yue: Cantonese Yale Romanization waahktái Jyutping waak6tai2
Third alternative Chinese name
Chinese	重文
Literal meaning	repeated writing
Transcriptions Standard Mandarin Hanyu Pinyin chóngwén Yue: Cantonese Yale Romanization chùng màn Jyutping cung4 man4
Vietnamese name
Vietnamese alphabet	chữ dị thể
Hán-Nôm	𡨸異體
Korean name
Hangul	이체자
Hanja	異體字
Transcriptions Revised Romanization icheja
Japanese name
Hiragana	いたいじ
Kyūjitai	異體字
Shinjitai	異体字
Transcriptions Romanization itaiji

Variant Chinese characters (traditional Chinese: 異體字; simplified Chinese: 异体字; pinyin: yìtǐzì; kanji: 異体字; Hepburn: itaiji; Korean: 이체자; Hanja: 異體字; Revised Romanization: icheja) are Chinese characters that are homophones and synonyms. Most variants are allographs in most circumstances, such as casual handwriting. Some contexts require the usage of certain variants, such as in textbook editing.

Regional standards

From right to left: Kangxi Dictionary forms, mainland China standard, Hong Kong standard, Taiwan standard, Japanese standard. Areas in the rightmost column where there are significant differences among different standards are highlighted in yellow. (Note: 玄 is not written completely in the Kangxi Dictionary because 玄 is a character in the Kangxi Emperor's given name, 玄燁. It was taboo to write in full a character in the emperor's given name, so 玄 and all characters containing it as a component are missing the final dot. Similarly, the final vertical stroke in 燁 is also omitted.)

Variant Chinese characters exist within and across all regions where Chinese characters are used, whether Chinese-speaking (mainland China, Hong Kong, Macau, Taiwan, Singapore), Japanese-speaking (Japan), or Korean-speaking (North Korea, South Korea). Some of the governments of these regions have made efforts to standardize the use of variants, by establishing certain variants as standard. The choice of which variants to use has resulted in some divergence in the forms of Chinese characters used in mainland China, Hong Kong, Japan, Korea and Taiwan. This effect compounds with the sometimes drastic divergence in the standard Chinese character sets of these regions resulting from the character simplifications pursued by mainland China and by Japan.

The standard character forms of each region are described in:

• The Table of General Standard Chinese Characters for mainland China
• The List of Graphemes of Commonly-Used Chinese Characters for Hong Kong
• The Standard Form of National Characters for Taiwan
• The list of Jōyō kanji for Japan
• The Kangxi Dictionary (de facto) for Korea

There are other standards or glyph sets with widespread use in particular regions (particularly for Traditional Chinese) which might not have an officially recognized status, but has a large user base using it daily. A few of such standard includes the Monotype Traditional Chinese fonts or Inherited Glyphs standard, which is compiled by Traditional Chinese users based on daily seen glyphs.

Variants of 漢 in the CJKV languages

Origins of variants

Character forms that are most orthodox are known as orthodox variants (正字; zhèngzì), which is sometimes taken as homonymous to Kangxi Dictionary forms (康熙字典體; Kāngxī zìdiǎn tǐ), as the forms found in the Kangxi dictionary are usually the ones considered to be orthodox, at least by late Imperial China standards. Variants that differ from the orthodox form, mainly used in informal situations, are known as folk variants (俗字; súzì; Revised Romanization: sokja; Hepburn: zokuji). Some of these are longstanding abbreviations or alternate forms that became the basis for the simplified character set promulgated by the People's Republic of China. For example, 痴 is the folk variant, whereas 癡 is the orthodox form, of the character meaning 'foolish' or 'obsessive'. In this case, two different phonetic elements were chosen to represent the same sound. In other cases, the differences between the orthodox form and popular form are merely minor distinctions in the length or location of strokes, whether certain strokes cross, or the presence or absence of minor inconspicuous strokes (dots). These are often not considered true variant characters but are adoptions of different standards for character shape. In mainland China, these are called xin zixing, typically a simplified popular form) and jiu zixing, typically the Kangxi Dictionary form). For instance, 述 is the new form of the character with traditional orthography 述 'recount', 'describe'. As another example, the surname 吴, also the name of an ancient state, is the 'new character shape' form of the character traditionally written 吳.

Variant graphs also sometimes arise during the historical processes of liding (隸定; 'clerical fixing') and libian (隸變; 'clerical changing'). Libian was the natural evolving process of the seal script into the clerical script, which often involved significant omissions, additions, or transmutations of graphical form, while liding is the direct regularization and linearization of shapes to convert them into clerical forms while also preserving the original structure. For instance, the small seal script character for 'year' was converted by liding to a clerical script form that led to the variant 秊, while the same character, after undergoing libian, gave rise to a clerical script form that eventually became the orthodox 年. A similar divergence in the regularization process led to two characters for 'tiger', 虎 and 乕.

Twelve variants of the character 劍 (double-edged sword), varying in both radical use and component form. 僉 (or 㑒, 佥) is phonetic. 刀 (or 刂) refers to a blade. 金 (or 釒) refers to metal. 刃 (or 刄) refers to a blade edge.

There are variants that arise through the use of different radicals to refer to specific definitions of a polysemous character. For instance, the character 雕 could mean either 'a type of hawk' or 'carve'. For the former, the variant 鵰 (with the ⿃ 'BIRD' radical) is sometimes employed, while for the latter, the variant 琱 (with the ⽟ 'JADE' radical) is sometimes used.

In rare cases, two characters in ancient Chinese with similar meanings can be confused and conflated if their modern Chinese readings have merged, for example, 飢 and 饑, are both read as jī and mean 'famine', used interchangeably in the modern language, even though 飢 meant 'insufficient food to satiate', and 饑 meant 'famine' in Old Chinese. The two characters formerly belonged to two different Old Chinese rime groups (脂 and 微 groups, respectively) and could not possibly have had the same pronunciation back then. A similar situation is responsible for the existence of variant forms of the particle with the meaning 'in', 'to', 于 and 於 in the modern traditional character set. In both cases described above, the variants were merged into a single simplified character, 饥 and 于, by mainland authorities.

Usage in computing

Variants of the Chinese character for guī (龟; 龜; 'turtle'), collected c. 1800 from printed sources

Five of the 30 variant characters found in the preface of the Kangxi Dictionary which are not found in the dictionary itself

In San Po Kong, Wong Tai Sin District, Hong Kong, these two road signs indicate the same destination - Kai Tak, but they use different variants of the same character for "Kai" - 啓 and 啟.

Unicode deals with variant characters in a complex manner, as a result of the process of Han unification. In Han unification, some variants that are nearly identical between Chinese-, Japanese-, Korean-speaking regions are encoded in the same code point, and can only be distinguished using different typefaces. Other variants that are more divergent are encoded in different code points. On web pages, displaying the correct variants for the intended language is dependent on the typefaces installed on the computer, the configuration of the web browser and the language tags of web pages. Systems that are ready to display the correct variants are rare because many computer users do not have standard typefaces installed and the most popular web browsers are not configured to display the correct variants by default. The following are some examples of variant forms of Chinese characters with different code points and language tags.

The following are some examples of variant forms of Chinese characters with the same code points and different language tags.

Graphemic variants

Some variants are not allographic.For a set of variants to be allographs, someone who could read one should be able to read the others, but some variants cannot be read if one only knows one of them. An example is 搜 and 蒐, where someone who is able to read 搜 might not be able to read 蒐. Another example is 㠯, which is a variant of 以, but some people who could read 以 might not be able to read 㠯.

See also

• Ryakuji – Form of shorthand for writing kanji
• Han unification – Effort by Unicode/ISO 10646 to map Han characters into a single set, ignoring regional variations
• Z-variant – Glyphs with minor typographical differences

External links

• Dictionary of Chinese Character Variants