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Variant Chinese Characters
The complexity of the Chinese writing system is
well known. Some of the linguistic factors that contribute to this include the
large number of characters in common use, the complexity of the character forms,
the major differences between traditional Chinese and simplified Chinese along
various dimensions (orthography, phonology, semantics), the presence of numerous
orthographic variants in traditional Chinese, and others.
Variant characters refer to a set of characters with the same pronunciation
and meaning but different shapes. Since Chinese characters are comprised of
meaning signs, phonetic signs and marks, different people in different periods
might have chosen different meaning signs from different perspectives and
phonetic signs, different from alphabetic letters, do not have uniform forms. As
a result, variant characters can be found everywhere in the history of Chinese
characters.
Variant Chinese characters can be categorized into six
groups - variant characters with different graphic components, variant
characters with the same phonetic components such as 
(liang, grain), 
(lian, pity), 
(xiu, embroider), 
(jiao, glue), 
(ku, trousers) and 
(xian, string); variant characters with components in different places; variant
characters created differently such as 
(diao, condole), 
(ti, body), and 
(lei, tear); variant characters with a different number of radicals such as 
(pang, mooch), 
(yi, doctor), and
(sheng, sound); and variant characters with different simplicity such
as 
(long, dragon), 
(xue, study), 
(tou, head) and 
(dui, right).
In order to facilitate people's study of Chinese characters, the Ministry of
Culture of the People's Republic of China and the Chinese Characters Reforming
Committee jointly published the first batch of variant characters, eliminating
1,055 variant characters.
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