What's the difference between generic characters, ancient and modern characters and variant characters?

Common words are different words. In a certain usage, these words can represent the same meaning, in which they can be substituted for each other, but these words may not be substituted everywhere. When used together, disyllabic words are homophones.

For example, knowing "wisdom" and being smart "not knowing is not knowing" come from Ten Analects of Confucius.

Ancient and modern characters refer to characters that are different from ancient and modern. We call the words before differentiation "ancient" and the words with their own specialties after differentiation "present".

There is no relationship between ancient Chinese characters and modern Chinese characters in font structure. Modern Chinese characters are produced on the basis of ancient Chinese characters, and ancient and modern Chinese characters are related in form.

For example, "anti" and "return" are ancient words and "return" is modern words.

Variant characters are different ways to write a word. Variant characters are synonymous with homophones, that is, they are written in different ways.

For example, "Feng" is a variant of "Feng".