Variant Chinese characters

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

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

Variant character
Regional variants of the character 返 as rendered by the Source 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
Transcriptions Revised Romanization icheja
Japanese name
Kanji	異体字
Transcriptions Romanization itaiji

Nature of variants

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

5 of the 30 variant characters found in the preface of the Kangxi 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 of woodblock printing. For example, prior to the Qin dynasty (221–206 BC) the character meaning 'bright' was written as either ‹See Tfd›明 or ‹See Tfd›朙—with either ‹See Tfd›日 'Sun' or ‹See Tfd›囧 'window' on the left, with the ‹See Tfd›月 'Moon' component on the right. Li Si (d. 208 BC), the Chancellor of Qin, attempted to universalize the Qin small seal script across China following the wars that had politically unified the country for the first time. Li prescribed the ‹See Tfd›朙 form of the word for 'bright', but some scribes ignored this and continued to write the character as ‹See Tfd›明. However, the increased usage of ‹See Tfd›朙 was followed by proliferation of a third variant: ‹See Tfd›眀, with ‹See Tfd›目 'eye' on the left—likely derived as a contraction of ‹See Tfd›朙. Ultimately, ‹See Tfd›明 became the character's standard form.

New variants also result from larger shifts in the writing system as a whole, such as the process of libian and liding that resulted in the clerical script. According to the palaeographer Qiu Xigui, the broadest trend in the evolution of Chinese characters over their history has been simplification, both in graphical shape (字形; zìxíng), the "external appearances of individual graphs", and in graphical form (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". Libian often involved significant omissions, additions, or transmutations of the forms used by Qin small seal script, while liding 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' was underwent liding to the clerical script form 秊, while the same character after undergoing libian resulted in the orthodox form 年. Similarly, libian and liding 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'. 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 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.

Orthodoxy

Character forms that are most orthodox are known as orthodox variants (正字; zhèngzì), which is sometimes taken as mean the forms present in the Kangxi 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 as folk variants (俗字; súzì; Revised Romanization: sokja; Hepburn: zokuji). Some folk variants are longstanding abbreviations or calligraphic forms, and later became the basis for the simplified 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 signalling the same pronunciation but being quicker to write. In mainland China, simplified forms are called xin zixing, typically contrasting with jiu zixing, which are usually the Kangxi 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, the surname 吴, also the name of an ancient state, is the 'new character shape' form of the character traditionally written 吳.

Regional standards

From right to left: Kangxi Dictionary forms, standards in mainland China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Japan. Significant differences are highlighted in yellow.

Character variant exist throughout every writing system that uses Chinese characters, including written Chinese, Japanese, and Korean. 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 between simplified and traditional forms. The standardization of simplified forms in Japan was distinct from the process in mainland China.

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 in Korea

Use in computing

Twelve variants of the character 劍 jiàn 'sword' that vary both in which components are used, as well as which specific allographs are used for said components:

• On the left side, 僉, 㑒 and 佥 qiān are allographs of the same phonetic component.
• On the right side, 刂 'KNIFE', 釒 'GOLD', and 刃 'blade edge' are each distinct signific components used by the different variants. 刄 is an allograph of 刃.

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 webpages, 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

Chinese			Japanese	Korean
Mainland	Taiwan	Hong Kong
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 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).

Same code point, different language tags

Chinese			Japanese	Korean
Mainland	Taiwan	Hong Kong
刃	刃	刃	刃	刃
令	令	令	令	令
毒	毒	毒	毒	毒
骨	骨	骨	骨	骨
縣	縣	縣	縣	縣
誤	誤	誤	誤	誤
船	船	船	船	船
述	述	述	述	述
煙	煙	煙	煙	煙
贈	贈	贈	贈	贈
雪	雪	雪	雪	雪
及	及	及	及	及
角	角	角	角	角
條	條	條	條	條
扁	扁	扁	扁	扁
低	低	低	低	低

Instead, the Unicode standard allows encoding these variants as variation sequences, by appending a variation selector format control to the standard CJK unified ideograph (it also works directly inside plain text, without needing to use any rich 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), part of the Unicode Characters Database (UCD), and it is expansible without reencoding new code points in the UCS (and since the Unicode version where variation selectors were encoded, it's no longer needed to encode any new compatibility ideograph to render them; the two blocks CJK Compatibility Ideographs and CJK Compatibility Ideographs Supplement in the BMP 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).

See also

Ryakuji – Form of shorthand for writing kanji

Z-variant – Glyphs with minor typographical differences

Variant form (Unicode) – Alternate glyph for a character in Unicode

References

Works cited

• Bökset, Roar (2006), Long Story of Short Forms: The Evolution of Simplified Chinese Characters (PDF), Stockholm East Asian Monographs, vol. 11, Stockholm University, ISBN 978-9-162-86832-1, archived (PDF) from the original on 2021-12-02, retrieved 2024-03-12
• Qiu Xigui (裘锡圭) (2000) [1988], Chinese Writing, translated by Gilbert L. Mattos; Norman, Jerry, Berkeley: Society for the Study of Early China and The Institute of East Asian Studies, University of California, ISBN 978-1-557-29071-7
• 異體字字典 [Dictionary of Chinese Character Variants] (in Chinese), Academica Sinica, 2017