MySQL 5.7 Reference Manual Including MySQL NDB Cluster 7.5 and NDB Cluster 7.6

10.9.3 The utf8 Character Set (Alias for utf8mb3)

utf8 is an alias for the utf8mb3 character set. For more information, see Section 10.9.2, “The utf8mb3 Character Set (3-Byte UTF-8 Unicode Encoding)”.

MySQL Documentation Library