In Python it is easily possible to findout the name of a Unicode character and findout some properties about that character. The module which does that is called unicodedata . An example: >>> import unicodedata >>> unicodedata.name( '☺' ) 'WHITE SMILING FACE' This module uses the data as released in the UnicodeData.txt file from the unicode.org website. So if UnicodeData.txt is a 'database', then we should be able to import it into MySQL and use it! I wrote a small Python script to automate this. The basic steps are: Download UnicodeData.txt Create a unicodedata.ucd table Use LOAD DATA LOCAL INFILE to load the data This isn't difficult especially because the file doesn't have the actual characters in it. It is just an ASCII file with codepoints and the data related to it. But it would be useful to have those characters in the database. So what I did is to create those with CONVERT(UNHEX(value) USING utf32 . What that does...