Two road signs inSan Po Kong, Hong Kong indicating the same name forKai Tak with different variants (啓 and啟) of the character for "Kai".

Chinese characters may have several variant forms—visually distinctglyphs that represent the same underlying meaning and pronunciation. Variants of a given character areallographs of one another, and many are directly analogous to allographs present in theEnglish alphabet, such as the double-storey⟨a⟩ and single-storey⟨ɑ⟩ variants of the letter A, with the latter more commonly appearing inhandwriting. Some contexts require usage of specific variants.

Variant character
Regional variants of the character返 as rendered by theSource Han Sans font family
Chinese name
Traditional Chinese	異體字
Simplified Chinese	异体字
Literal meaning	variant character form
Transcriptions Standard Mandarin Hanyu Pinyin yìtǐzì Yue: Cantonese Yale Romanization yihtáijih Jyutping ji6-tai2-zi6
Alternative Chinese name
Traditional Chinese	又體
Simplified Chinese	又体
Literal meaning	alternative 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 waak6-tai2
Third alternative Chinese name
Chinese	重文
Literal meaning	alternative writing
Transcriptions Standard Mandarin Hanyu Pinyin chóngwén Yue: Cantonese Yale Romanization chùngmàn 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
Kyūjitai	異體字
Shinjitai	異体字
Transcriptions Romanization itaiji Kunrei-shiki itaizi

Variants of the characterguī (龟;龜; 'turtle') collected from printed sourcesc. 1800

5 of the 30 variant characters found in the preface of theKangxi Dictionary not found in the dictionary itself

Before the 20th century, variation in the shape of characters was ubiquitous, a dynamic which continued after the invention ofwoodblock printing. For example, prior to theQin dynasty (221–206 BC) the character meaning 'bright' was written as either明 or朙—with either日 'Sun' or囧 'window' on the left, with the月 'Moon'component on the right.Li Si (d. 208 BC), theChancellor of Qin, attempted to universalize the Qinsmall seal script across China followingthe wars that had politically unified the country for the first time. Li prescribed the朙 form of the word for 'bright', but some scribes ignored this and continued to write the character as明. However, the increased usage of朙 was followed by proliferation of a third variant:眀, with目 'eye' on the left—likely derived as a contraction of朙. Ultimately,明 became the character's standard form.^[1]

New variants also result from larger shifts in the writing system as a whole, such as the process oflibian andliding that resulted in theclerical script. According to the palaeographer Qiu Xigui, the broadest trend in the evolution of Chinese characters over their history has been simplification, both in graphicalshape (字形;zìxíng), the "external appearances of individual graphs", and in graphicalform (字体;字體;zìtǐ), "overall changes in the distinguishing features of graphic[al] shape and calligraphic style, [...] in most cases refer[ring] to rather obvious and rather substantial changes".^[2]Libian often involved significant omissions, additions, or transmutations of the forms used by Qin small seal script, whileliding is the direct regularization and linearization of shapes to convert them into clerical forms while preserving their original structure. For example, the character for 'year' underwentliding to the clerical script form秊, while the same character after undergoinglibian resulted in the orthodox form年. Similarly,libian andliding created the two distinct characters虎 and乕 for 'tiger'.

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'. Variants using different radicals to specify thus developed: respectively鵰, with a⿃ 'BIRD' radical, and琱, with a⽟ 'JADE' radical.

In rare cases, two characters in ancient Chinese with similar meanings were confused and conflated when their modern Chinese readings merged, for example,飢 and饑, are both read asjī and mean 'famine', used interchangeably in the modern language, even though飢 initially meant 'insufficient food to satiate' and饑 meant 'famine' inOld Chinese. The two characters formerly belonged to two different Old Chineserime groups (脂 and微 groups, respectively) which indicates they had different pronunciations back then. A similar situation is responsible for the existence of variants of the particle於 'in' which had the ancient form于, now used as its simplified form. In each case above, variants were merged into single simplified forms.

Character forms that are most orthodox are known asorthodox variants (正字;zhèngzì), which is sometimes taken as mean the forms present in theKangxi Dictionary (康熙字典體;Kāngxī zìdiǎn tǐ), which usually represent the orthodox forms used in late imperial China. Non-orthodox forms are known asfolk variants (俗字;súzì;Revised Romanization:sokja;Hepburn:zokuji). Some folk variants are longstanding abbreviations or calligraphic forms, and later became the basis for thesimplified forms adopted on the mainland. For example,痴 is a folk variant corresponding to the orthodox form癡 'foolish'. These forms differ by their phonetic component, with the folk variant using a character with a "close enough" pronunciation but having much less strokes and thus quicker to write. In mainland China, simplified forms are calledxin zixing, typically contrasting withjiu zixing, which are usually theKangxi form.

Orthodox and vulgar forms may only differ by the length or location of individual strokes, whether certain strokes intersect, or the presence or absence of minor strokes (dots). These are often not considered to amount to being discrete variants. For instance,述 is the new form of the character with traditional orthography述 'recount', 'describe'. As another example, thesurname吴, also the name of anancient state, is the 'new character shape' form of the character traditionally written吳.

Character variant exist throughout every writing system that uses Chinese characters, includingwritten Chinese,Japanese, andKorean. Several governments of countries that speak these languages have standardized their writing systems by specifying certain variants as the standard form. The choice of which variants to use has resulted in some bifurcation of written Chinese betweensimplified andtraditional forms. The standardization of simplified forms in Japan was distinct from the process in mainland China.

The standard character forms prescribed by the government of each region are described in:

• TheList of Commonly Used Standard Chinese Characters for mainland China
• TheList of Graphemes of Commonly-Used Chinese Characters for Hong Kong (educational usage only)
• TheStandard Form of National Characters for Taiwan (educational usage only)
• The list ofjōyō kanji for Japan
• TheKangxi Dictionary in Korea

Unicode deals with variant characters in a complex manner, as a result of the process ofHan unification. In Han unification, some variants that are nearly identical between Chinese-, Japanese-, Korean-speaking regions are encoded in the samecode point, and can only be distinguished using differenttypefaces. Other variants that are more divergent are encoded in different code points. Onwebpages, displaying the correct variants for the intended language is dependent on the typefaces installed on the computer, the configuration of the web browser and thelanguage 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 examples have the same code points, but different language tags. However language tags rarely work correctly to get the expected forms from text renderers (e.g. in the table below where all rendered glyphs may look the same).

Instead, the Unicode standard allows encoding these variants asvariation sequences,^[3] by appending avariation selector (a glyph-less non-spacing mark) to the standard CJKunified ideograph (it also works directly inside plain text, without needing to use anyrich text format to select the appropriate language or script, and allows easier and more selective control when the same language/script combination needs several variants). The list of valid variation sequences is standardized by Unicode, defined in the Ideographic Variation Database (IVD),^[4][5] part of the Unicode Characters Database (UCD),^[6] and it is expansible without reencoding new code points in the UCS (and since the Unicode versions where variation selectors were encoded and the IVD established, it's no longer needed to encode any newcompatibility ideograph to render them; the two blocksCJK Compatibility Ideographs in theBMP andCJK Compatibility Ideographs Supplement in theSIP are now frozen since Unicode 4.1, except to fix a few past mistakes that were forgotten during the Han unification process for the review of normative sources).^[7]

Chinese characters
Chinese family of scripts Written Chinese Kanji Hanja Chữ Hán
Evolution ofscript styles Neolithic symbols in China Oracle bone Bronze Seal Large Small Bird-worm Clerical Cursive Semi-cursive Regular Flat brush Modern typefaces Fangsong Ming Hei
Properties andclassification Components Strokes order Radicals Orthography jiu zixing xin zixing Digital encoding
Collation and standards Kangxi Dictionary forms (1716) Commonly Used Characters (PRC, 2013) Commonly-Used Characters (Hong Kong, 2007) Nan Min Recommended Characters (Taiwan, 2009) Standard Form of National Characters (Taiwan, 1982) Jōyō kanji (Japan, 2010)
Reforms Simplified characters second round Traditional characters debate Japanese script reform kyūjitai
Homographs and readings Literary and colloquial readings Kanbun Idu
Variants Zetian characters
Derived systems Kana man'yōgana hiragana katakana Jurchen script Khitan large small Nüshu Bopomofo Slavonic transcription
Transliteration of Chinese
v t e

• Chinese characters

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