Z-variant

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 codepoints. 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.

Differences on the Z-axis

The Unicode philosophy of codepoint 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 codepoints 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.