够 or 夠 - Two characters, one meaning?

Question

够 or 夠 both mean be enough according to my electronic dictionaries. I was surprised to find one character in my text "Reading & Writing Chinese," (McNaughton & Li, 1999)

A different character was in my electronic dictionary (夠).

My first thought was:

Does this happen with other characters or is this an error?

Then I tried typing gou into a different program on the same computer and came up with the second character (having the same meaning).

Which is right? Are there other characters with this behavior?

Answer 1

够 or 夠 shared the same meaning and same pronunciation. We called this situation as 異體字(Variant character). In Taiwan or Hong Kong, we use 夠 more frequently than 够. In Mainland China, they use the opposite one more frequent. All of us can understand both words.

For more about variant character in Chinese, you may refer to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Variant_Chinese_character

Answer 2

It happens on many characters.I think you are learning simplified Chinese,according to your picture,够 is right。If Cantonese or traditional Chinese,use the other one.

Answer 3

够 is the simplified version. 夠 is the traditional version.

(I wonder if this is a case of the Language Reform Committee -- who were in charge of the simplification of the characters -- needing to be seen to be doing something, so they just switched the 2 components over, box ticked! Haha.)