The paper analyses couples of Italian nouns, which, differing minimally in their signifiants (only by their endings), are nearly identical by their signifiés: la cesta / il cesto. A comparative study of their lexical sense by means of different dictionaries reveals that they present mostly semantic variants. We conclude that only a small part of them are real duplets (lexemes, which are identic from the semantic and stylistic point of view). The rest of them appear to be incomplete variants since they differ by their meanings.