West European Character Sets The two characters in the chart are in order by code point value because  0xff9d  <  0x10384 . And they are in order by  utf8  value because  0xef  <  0xf0 . But they are not in order by  utf16  value, if we use byte-by-byte comparison, because  0xff  >  0xd8 . So MySQL’s  utf16_bin  collation is not “byte by byte.”  It is “by code point.”  When MySQL sees a supplementary-character encoding in  utf16 , it converts to the character’s code-point value, and then compares. Therefore,  utf8_bin  and  utf16_bin  are the same ordering. This is consistent with the SQL:2008 standard requirement for a UCS_BASIC collation: “UCS_BASIC is a collation in which the ordering is determined entirely by the Unicode scalar values of the characters in the strings being sorted. It is applicable to the UCS character repertoire. Since every character repertoire is a subset of the UCS repertoire, the UCS_BASIC collation is potentially applicable to every character set. NOTE 11: The Unicode scalar value of a character is its code point treated as an unsigned integer.” If the character set is  ucs2 , comparison is byte-by-byte, but  ucs2  strings should not contain surrogates, anyway. The  xxx _general_mysql500_ci  collations preserve the pre-5.1.24 ordering of the original xxx _general_ci  collations and permit upgrades for tables created before MySQL 5.1.24 (Bug #27877). Western European character sets cover most West European languages, such as French, Spanish, Catalan, Basque, Portuguese, Italian, Albanian, Dutch, German, Danish, Swedish, Norwegian, Finnish, Faroese, Icelandic, Irish, Scottish, and English. 1977 Miscellaneous Information 10.10.2 West European Character Sets • ascii  (US ASCII) collations: • ascii_bin • ascii_general_ci  (default) • cp850  (DOS West European) collations: • cp850_bin • cp850_general_ci  (default) • dec8  (DEC Western European) collations: • dec8_bin • dec8_swedish_ci  (default) • hp8  (HP Western European) collations: • hp8_bin • hp8_english_ci  (default) • latin1  (cp1252 West European) collations: • latin1_bin • latin1_danish_ci