Abstract: Taiping Guangji cited numerous stories from Youyang Zazu. By taking the cited Youyang Zazu Nuogao Ji as an example, the variant characters can be divided into three parts: variant characters, ancient and new characters, substitute characters, and regular and popular characters. For variant characters, Taiping Guangji often presented a complicated usage where two words are interchangeable and slightly different; for ancient and new characters, Taiping Guangji had both ancient and new characters, but the new characters were adopted more frequently; for substitute characters, Taiping Guangji tended to avoid such characters and pursued accuracy; for regular and popular characters, Taiping Guangji tended to use regular characters.

Key words: Taiping Guangji(《太平广记》), Youyang Zazu(《酉阳杂俎》), variant characters