Variant characters (yìtǐzì 異體字) are alternate forms of the same character: 峰/峯 fēng 'mountain top', 群/羣 qún 'group, flock', 册/冊 cè, 裏/裡 lǐ 'inside'. While the term yìtǐzì has been – and still is – used in this sense by the general public in China, modern research prefers to deemphasize the character in favor of the word it represents in context. Accordingly, a variant is defined by the word it stands for, even if one would intuitively identify it as a different character on account of graphical properties. For this reason…