The paper deals with idiom variability, distinguishing between variability in the broader sense (including idiom synonymy) and idiom variation, which is the systemic language change of the idiom?s signifier leaving its signified largely intact. Differing types of idiom variation are listed.One of the key concepts of idiom variability is that of invariant, i.e. the key properties of the idiom that remain unchanged during the transformation. Synonyms (i.e., words and figurative units belonging to one synonymic set) share a logico-semiotic invariant. Variants of one idiom in the domain of both the signifier and signified can be reduced to one structure-semantic invariant. Besides, complete synonyms (i.e., the ones close enough to each other as to cause confusion while not being variants of one figurative unit) share a purely structural invariant. In other words, one should distinguish between three aspects of the idiom invariant. This enables distinction between idioms and syntactic phrasemes, or constructional phrasemes: the latter have a highly abstract logico-semiotic invariant (to an extent of reducing it to a lexical function such as Magn or Oper in Igor A. Mel??uk?s terms) and a highly specific structural one.
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