Variant Chinese character


Variant Chinese characters are Chinese characters that are homophones and synonyms. Almost all 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

Variant Chinese characters exist within and across all regions where Chinese characters are used, whether Chinese-speaking, Japanese-speaking, or Korean-speaking. 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:
Character forms that are most orthodox are known as orthodox characters or Kangxi Dictionary form, as the forms found in the Kangxi dictionary are usually the ones consider to be orthodox, at least by late Imperial China standards. Variants that are used in informal situations are known as popular characters. 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 popular variant, whereas 癡 is the orthodox form of the character meaning 'stupid; demented'. 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. These are often not considered true variant characters but are adoptions of different standards for character shape. In mainland China, these are called 新字形 and 旧字形. For instance, 述 is the new form of the character with traditional orthography 述 'recount; describe'. As another example, 吴 'a surname; 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 and libian, which refer to conversion of seal script to clerical script by simple regularization and linearization of shape or more significant omissions, additions, or transmutations of graphical form. For instance, the small seal script character for 'year' was converted by more conservative liding to a clerical script form that eventually led to the variant 秊, while the same character, after undergoing the more drastic 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.
, varying in both radical use and component form. is phonetic. refers to a blade. refers to metal. refers to a blade edge.
There are variants that arise through the use of different radicals to refer to specific definitions of a multisemous character. For instance, the character 雕 could mean either 'certain types of hawk' or 'carve; engrave.' For the former, the variant 鵰 is sometimes employed, while for the latter, the variant 琱 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; severe hunger' and are 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 and could not possibly have had the same pronunciation back then. A similar situation is responsible for the existence of variant forms of the preposition with the meaning 'in; to', 于 and 於 in the modern orthography. In both cases described above, the variants were merged into a single simplified Chinese character, 饥 and 于, by the mainland authorities.

Usage in computing

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.
Different code points,
China language tag		Different code points,
Taiwan language tag		Different code points,
Hong Kong language tag		Different code points,
Japanese language tag		Different code points,
Korean language tag
戶戸户戶戸户戶戸户戶戸户戶戸户
爲為为爲為为爲為为爲為为爲為为
強强強强強强強强強强
畫畵画畫畵画畫畵画畫畵画畫畵画
線綫线線綫线線綫线線綫线線綫线
匯滙匯滙匯滙匯滙匯滙
裏裡裏裡裏裡裏裡裏裡
夜亱夜亱夜亱夜亱夜亱
龜亀龟龜亀龟龜亀龟龜亀龟龜亀龟

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.