Octopus kanji: 章魚 vs 蛸 vs 鮹 I'm trying to determine the most appropriate kanji for (octopus), and have come across three possibilities: , , and . * According to jisho.org, all three possibilities are read as . * The Pocket Kenkyusha Japanese Dictionary (ISBN 978-0-19-860748-9) includes . * The Collins English-Japanese Dictionary (ISBN 0-00-719655-5) only gives . My question: How common is each variant, and are their meanings truly equivalent? For example: * octopus * octopus * octopus * octopus My understanding is that any of the above could be considered _correct_ (though some would seem more unusual than others) and that they all have the exact same meaning.

If you look at , then is by far the most common option. This is confirmed by the frequency data in the BCCWJ (Balanced Corpus of Contemporary Written Japanese, via <


676 results
129 results
32 results
10 results
2 results
0 results


is still a lot more popular than any version. (But that's to be expected since, like many other for animals, is not and readings are very rare.)

Of course, can also be written in . It's not easy to get numbers, but even looking at alone, we already get big numbers:


244 results
39 results
1 result


Just something to keep in mind when choosing whether to write in or not.

* * *

_Edit._

The dictionary entry for is

> **** [1]
>
> [...]

The notation means that the _kanji_ is not and the angled brackets mean that the reading is . As such, writing as or or wouldn't be seen as incorrect, but unusual.