# Unicode

Unicode is a standard for encoding text across multiple writing systems. MariaDB supports a number of [character sets]() for storing Unicode data:

| Character Set | Description                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                      |
| ------------- | ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ |
| ucs2          | UCS-2, each character is represented by a 2-byte code with the most significant byte first. Fixed-length 16-bit encoding.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                        |
| utf8          | Until [MariaDB 10.5](https://app.gitbook.com/s/aEnK0ZXmUbJzqQrTjFyb/community-server/old-releases/mariadb-10-5-series/what-is-mariadb-105), this was a UTF-8 encoding using one to three bytes per character. Basic Latin letters, numbers and punctuation use one byte. European and Middle East letters mostly fit into 2 bytes. Korean, Chinese, and Japanese ideographs use 3-bytes. No supplementary characters are stored. From [MariaDB 10.6](https://app.gitbook.com/s/aEnK0ZXmUbJzqQrTjFyb/community-server/mariadb-10-6-series/what-is-mariadb-106), utf8 is an alias for utf8mb3, but this can changed to ut8mb4 by changing the default value of the [old\_mode](../../../../../server-management/variables-and-modes/server-system-variables#old_mode) system variable. From [MariaDB 11.8](https://app.gitbook.com/s/aEnK0ZXmUbJzqQrTjFyb/community-server/mariadb-11-8-series/what-is-mariadb-118), utf8 is an alias for utf8mb4. |
| utf8mb3       | UTF-8 encoding using one to three bytes per character. Basic Latin letters, numbers and punctuation use one byte. European and Middle East letters mostly fit into 2 bytes. Korean, Chinese, and Japanese ideographs use 3-bytes. No supplementary characters are stored. Until [MariaDB 10.5](https://app.gitbook.com/s/aEnK0ZXmUbJzqQrTjFyb/community-server/old-releases/mariadb-10-5-series/what-is-mariadb-105), this was an alias for utf8. From [MariaDB 10.6](https://app.gitbook.com/s/aEnK0ZXmUbJzqQrTjFyb/community-server/mariadb-10-6-series/what-is-mariadb-106), utf8 is by default an alias for utf8mb3, but this can changed to ut8mb4 by changing the default value of the [old\_mode](../../../../../server-management/variables-and-modes/server-system-variables#old_mode) system variable.                                                                                                                                 |
| utf8mb4       | UTF-8 encoding the same as utf8mb3 but which stores supplementary characters in four bytes.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                      |
| utf16         | UTF-16, same as ucs2, but stores supplementary characters in 32 bits. 16 or 32-bits.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                             |
| utf32         | UTF-32, fixed-length 32-bit encoding.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                            |

Support for the UCA-14.0.0 collations was added in [MariaDB 10.10](https://app.gitbook.com/s/aEnK0ZXmUbJzqQrTjFyb/community-server/old-releases/release-notes-mariadb-10-10-series/what-is-mariadb-1010) ([MDEV-27009](https://jira.mariadb.org/browse/MDEV-27009)) .

Support for the MySQL 8.0 UCA-9-0-0 (utf8mb4\_0900\_...) collations will be added to [MariaDB 11.4.5](https://app.gitbook.com/s/aEnK0ZXmUbJzqQrTjFyb/community-server/mariadb-11-4-series/mariadb-11-4-5-release-notes)

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