How does one go from a Unicode character to its description?

Question

I came across this cute little symbol today:

Answer 1

If you just want to know the glyph name, head on over to CodePoints (or Graphemica or probably any one of a dozen other sites) and do a search on it. I'm not sure which lookup services you used "to no avail" but those two have no issues in locating it.

Doing so with

Answer 2

This information comes from the Unicode Character Database.

Specifically, the code points and their names (and other info like the category of a code point) are defined in UnicodeData.txt.

A lot of programming languages have this information in the standard library, eg. the unicodedata module of Python.