Chinese Variants and Japanese Variants (Applies only to IDN domains registered using the Chinese (zh) or Japanese (ja) language)

Some Chinese and Japanese characters use different visual representations (variants) of the same character. The tables utilized for IDN registrations assume that when one variant of a Chinese or Japanese character is registered, then other variants are blocked in that language. According to the ICANN application, in order to mitigate issues that may arise due to Chinese or Japanese variant characters, the registry will allow only a single Chinese label or Japanese label to be registered out of the set of all variant labels in the applicable language that are equivalent to it, according to the defined preferred and other variants.

The Registry will ensure effective availability check for such domain registrations, checking any proposed Chinese or Japanese domain against a canonical form of the domain name. Canonical forms of existing domain names will be stored in The Registry’s database in order to facilitate lookups