Z-variant

Glyphs with minor typographical differences

In Unicode, two glyphs are said to be Z variants (often spelled zVariants) if they share the same etymology but have slightly different appearances and different Unicode code points. For example, the Unicode characters U+8AAA 說 and U+8AAC 説 are Z variants. The notion of Z variance is only applicable to the "CJKV scripts"—Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Vietnamese—and is a subtopic of Han unification.

The Unicode philosophy of code point allocation for CJK languages is organized along three "axes." The X axis represents differences in semantics; for example, the Latin capital A (U+0041 A) and the Greek capital alpha (U+0391 Α) are represented by two distinct code points in Unicode, and might be termed "X variants" (though this term is not common). The Y axis represents significant differences in appearance though not in semantics; for example, the traditional Chinese character māo "cat" (U+8C93 貓) and the simplified Chinese character (U+732B 猫) are Y variants. The Z axis represents minor typographical differences. For example, the Chinese characters (U+838A 莊) and (U+8358 荘) are Z variants, as are (U+8AAA 說) and (U+8AAC 説). The glossary at Unicode. org defines "Z variant" as "Two CJK unified ideographs with identical semantics and unifiable shapes," one finds "no" (U+4E0D 不) and (U+F967 不︀) described as "font variants," the term "Z variant" being apparently reserved for interlanguage pairs such as the Mandarin Chinese "rabbit" (U+5154 兔) and the Japanese "rabbit" (U+514E 兎). However, the Unicode Consortium's Unihan database treats both pairs as Z variants.