Variant Chinese characters are Chinese characters that can be used interchangeably. They are the same in pronunciation and meaning, but different in appearance. Some characters are interchangeable in all circumstances, while others are interchangeable only in some contexts and are distinct in others. 漢字 / 汉字 Chinese character in Hànzì, kanji, hanja, Hán Tá»±. A Chinese character (Traditional Chinese: ; Simplified Chinese: , pinyin: Hànzì) is a logogram used in writing Chinese, Japanese, sometimes Korean, and formerly also Vietnamese. ... Traditional Chinese characters are one of two standard sets of printed Chinese characters. ... Simplified Chinese characters (Simplified Chinese: 简体字; Traditional Chinese: 簡體字; pinyin: jiÇŽntǐzì; also Simplified Chinese: 简化字; Traditional Chinese: 簡化字; pinyin: jiÇŽnhuàzì) are one of two standard character sets of printed contemporary Chinese written language. ... The second round of Chinese character simplification was officially promulgated on December 20, 1977 by the Peoples Republic of China, and replaced the existing (first round) simplified Chinese characters that were already in use. ... Japanese writing Kanji Kana Hiragana Katakana Hentaigana Manyōgana Uses Furigana Okurigana Rōmaji Kanji (Japanese:  ) are the Chinese characters that are used in the modern Japanese logographic writing system along with hiragana (平仮名), katakana (片仮名), and the Hindu-Arabic numerals. ... Look up KyÅ«jitai in Wiktionary, the free dictionary KyÅ«jitai (Shinjitai: 旧字体 KyÅ«jitai: 舊字體, meaning old character form) is the traditional form of the Japanese kanji used before 1947. ... Shinjitai (Shinjitai: 新字体 KyÅ«jitai: æ–°å­—é«”, meaning new character form), are the forms of Kanji used in Japan since the promulgation of the Tōyō Kanji List in 1946. ... It has been suggested that Sino-Korean be merged into this article or section. ... The word calligraphy means good writing. The art of calligraphy is widely practiced and revered in the East Asian civilizations that uses Chinese characters. ... Oracle bone script (Chinese: 甲骨文; Hanyu Pinyin: ; literally shell bone writing) refers to incised (or, rarely, brush-written) ancient Chinese characters found on oracle bones, which are animal bones or turtle shells used in divination in ancient China. ... Bronzeware script (金文 pinyin jin wen or 鐘鼎文 pinyin zhong1 ding3 wen2) is a family of scripts found on Chinese bronzes such as zhong (bells) and ding (tripods), since bronze artifacts with Chinese characters span many centuries and they have been found in many areas of China. ... 《尋隱者不遇》—賈島 松下問童子 言師採藥去 隻在此山中 雲深不知處 Seeking the Master but not Meeting by Jia Dao Beneath a pine I asked a little child. ... The clerical script (traditional Chinese 隷書, simplified Chinese 隶书) is an archaic style of Chinese calligraphy which, due to its high legibility to modern readers, is still being used for artistic flavor in a variety of functional applications such as headlines, signboards and advertisements. ... Sheng Jiao Xu by Chu Suiliang: calligraphy of the Kaishu style The Regular Script, or in Chinese Kaishu (楷書 Pinyin: kÇŽishÅ«) and Japanese Kaisho, also commonly known as Standard Regular (正楷), is the newest of the Chinese calligraphy styles (peaked at the 7th century), hence most common in modern writings and... Semi-cursive script (Chinese: 行書, Pinyin: XíngshÅ«, Japanese: gyōsho, Korean: haengseo) is a partially cursive style of Chinese calligraphy. ... Chinese characters of Cursive Script in regular script (left) and cursive script (right). ... Since the Chinese language uses a logographic script—that is a script where one or two character corresponds roughly to one word or meaning—there are vastly more characters, or glyphs, than there are keys on a standard computer keyboard. ... 漢字 / 汉字 Chinese character in Hànzì, kanji, hanja, Hán Tá»±. A Chinese character (Traditional Chinese: ; Simplified Chinese: , pinyin: Hànzì) is a logogram used in writing Chinese, Japanese, sometimes Korean, and formerly also Vietnamese. ...

Variant Chinese characters exist within and across all regions making use of Chinese characters, whether Chinese-speaking (mainland China, Hong Kong, Macau, Taiwan, Singapore), Japanese-speaking (Japan), or Korean-speaking (North Korea, South Korea). The highlighted area in the map is what is commonly known as mainland China. Mainland China (Simplified Chinese: 中国大陆; Traditional Chinese: 中國大陸; pinyin: Zhōnggúo Dàlù; literally The Chinese Massive Landmass or Continental China) is an informal (disputed — see talk page) geographical term which is usually synonymous with the area...

Many of the governments in the above places have made efforts to standardize the use of variants, by establishing one or more variants as "standard" and demoting the other variants as "nonstandard". The choice of which variant to use has resulted in some divergence in the Chinese characters used in mainland China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Japan, and Korea; this effect compounds with the already drastic divergence in the standard Chinese character sets of these regions resulting from the character simplications pursued by mainland China and by Japan. Simplified Chinese characters (Simplified Chinese: 简体字; Traditional Chinese: 簡體字; pinyin: jiǎntǐzì; also called 简化字/簡化字, jiǎnhuàzì) are one of two standard character sets of printed contemporary Chinese written language. ...

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 treated as the same character, and can only be distinguished using different fonts; while other variants that are more divergent are treated as separate characters. Because of technical limitations, some web browsers may not display some special characters in this article. ... Han unification is the process used by the authors of Unicode and the Universal Character Set to map multiple character sets of the CJK languages into a single set of unified characters. ...