Traditionally, orthographic variants have been modelled as different ways of spelling the same word - described at the level of the lexeme. But when inflection is taken into account, this runs into a problem: different citation forms have different inflectional paradigm - and orthographic variation does not merely affect the citation form, but the entire paradigm. The MorDebe database therefore models orthographic variation as a relation between distinct, yet still token-identical lexemes. This paper discusses the advantage of that approach, and the full set of practical problems that arose during the structural treatment of orthographic variation in the MorDebe database.