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ANCIENT SCRIPTS · TRANSLATOR

Rune Translator

Write your name in runes - every letter gets its own sign.

A simplified A-Z rune chart - every letter gets its own dedicated rune, no sharing.

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RUNES (A-Z CHART)ᚮᚾᛖ ᛗᚮᚱᛖ ᛍᛚᛁᛍᚴ
ANCIENT SCRIPTS

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The 22-letter ancestor of every alphabet you use today.

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The early-medieval Irish alphabet, letter by letter.

᚛ᚑᚌᚐᚋ᚜ A TO ZSCRIPTSAncient Scripts

Runes, Ogham, Phoenician, Cuneiform, Hieroglyphics - one console, five scripts.

5 SCRIPTSSCRIPTSHieroglyphics Translator

Write your name the Ancient Egyptian way.

𓄿-𓊃 A TO Z

THE HISTORY ◢

Runic writing was used in various forms from the first century to the nineteenth, and some 6,000 inscriptions are known. The oldest arrangement, the elder futhark, had 24 angular signs, each carrying a name of its own; a simplified younger futhark cut that to 16, and medieval Scandinavian carvers invented further runes so the set matched the Latin alphabet letter for letter.

THE LONG ANSWER ◢

The runic alphabet is named after its own first six runes: futhark, "after the first six letters" as Omniglot has it.

Now type FUTHARK into the box above. Seven glyphs come out for a six-rune name: one rune gets split in half, and another is the wrong form. That is worth a page of explanation, because it tells you exactly what an A-Z rune chart is and is not.

Key Takeaways

  • The Unicode Standard: "The original old futhark contained 24 runes." Elsewhere it is called the Elder Futhark.
  • A simplified younger futhark "consists of only 16 runes".
  • Runic use "covers a period from the first century to the nineteenth century", across some 6,000 known inscriptions.
  • Our chart is 26 signs, one per letter, so every letter you type survives a round trip.
  • None of the futhark counts our sources give is 26. Ours is a modern A-Z convenience.

Why can't the chart spell "futhark"?

Because our keys are Latin letters, and the runes they map to come from different centuries.

FUTHARK is seven letters in English and six runes in its own alphabet: F, U, Th, A, R, K. Two of those six go wrong here.

  • Th is one rune, Thurisaz, written ᚦ. English writes that sound with two letters, so our chart has no key for it and spends a T and an H instead. Thurisaz exists at U+16A6 and is simply not in our map.
  • K should be ᚲ Kauna, the form the older futhark uses. Ours is ᚴ Kaun, the younger one. That pairing comes from reading Omniglot's elder and younger futhark charts side by side, not from a sentence in either source.

Written properly in the old futhark, the word is ᚠᚢᚦᚨᚱᚲ. Ask the box above for it and you get ᚠᚢᛏᚺᚨᚱᚴ: seven signs instead of six, with a T and an H standing in for the thorn, and the younger k on the end.

So the box above cannot write the word it is named after, in the letters that name it. Nothing demonstrates more cleanly that this is a transliteration convenience rather than the alphabet itself.

Our 26 runes round-trip perfectly, and that should bother you

We ran every letter through our own translator. There are 26 distinct signs, nothing doubles up, and every letter A to Z comes home as the same letter. CLICKIDY goes out, CLICKIDY comes back. Digits and punctuation are dropped rather than transliterated, so the guarantee is about letters only.

That is a tidier result than Ogham manages next door, where four letters never survive the trip. It is also the more suspicious one.

A clean one-to-one map onto 26 letters is exactly what you would build by starting from English and going looking for runes to fill the slots. Unicode's naming shows the seams, because the standard explains its own convention: "Runic character names are based as much as possible on the sometimes several traditional names for each rune, often with the Latin transliteration at the end of the name."

So a rune with three traditional names gets all three recorded, then its Latin letter. Every name below is prefixed RUNIC LETTER, which we leave off to keep the table readable:

Our key Unicode name
F FEHU FEOH FE F
B BERKANAN BEORC BJARKAN B
I ISAZ IS ISS I
R RAIDO RAD REID R
T TIWAZ TIR TYR T
N NAUDIZ NYD NAUD N
L LAUKAZ LAGU LOGR L

Seven of our signs carry three names each, another five carry two, and five more carry a single name. Seventeen named signs in total. Where there are several, they look like Proto-Germanic, Old English and Old Norse forms of one rune, which is our reading of the standard's "sometimes several traditional names" rather than a label it applies.

Nine keys get none of that. For C, D, G, O, Q, V, X, Y and Z, the name stops at the bare Latin letter, so RUNIC LETTER C and nothing more.

So what are those nine?

Partly a choice we made, which is not the answer we expected when we went looking.

Start with what the standard does say. Unicode records that "the use of runes continued in Scandinavia during the Middle Ages. During that time, the futhark was influenced by the Latin alphabet and new runes were invented so that there was full correspondence with the Latin letters." So a Latin-matching rune set is not a modern shortcut. Medieval carvers got there first.

That explains why signs for these letters could exist. It does not explain our nine, and here the chart stops being able to hide behind history. The Runic block holds 83 letters in total, and for three of our bare-letter keys there is a rune sitting in the same block whose Unicode name ends with that letter as its own trailing transliteration:

Our key We use Available instead
D a bare-letter sign DAGAZ DAEG D
G a bare-letter sign GEBO GYFU G
O a bare-letter sign OS O, OTHALAN ETHEL O, LONG-BRANCH-OSS O, SHORT-TWIG-OSS O

We did not take any of them. The block holds other named runes too, Cen and Yr and Algiz Eolhx among them, but none of those names carries a trailing Latin transliteration, so a name list cannot tell us which modern letter each answers to.

The honest conclusion is narrower than the one we set out to write. For those three the naming gap is a fact about which code points this chart selected, not a gap in the rune inventory at all. For the other six we cannot say either way, and why the chart was built like this is not something these sources can tell you.

Which futhark is this, then?

None of them, and it is worth knowing that before you commit anything to skin.

Unicode gives two counts and one expansion. "The original old futhark contained 24 runes." Then "the simplified younger futhark appeared. It consists of only 16 runes." Separately, "in England and Friesland, seven more runes were added from the fifth to the ninth century".

Neither source says which set those seven joined. Additions starting in the fifth century cannot have been made to a younger futhark that Omniglot has stabilising around 800, so we read them as additions to the older 24.

Twenty-four, sixteen, twenty-four-plus-seven, and a medieval set built for Latin correspondence whose size our sources never state. None of the counts they do give is twenty-six.

The mixture shows up in our own glyph list. Read Omniglot's elder and younger futhark charts side by side and ᚨ Ansuz belongs to the older set, ᚴ Kaun to the younger. Different periods, one row of keys.

Pick a single futhark and it will not map cleanly onto English. What the box above offers instead is one legible rune per letter you actually typed.

How long were runes in use?

Far longer than the Viking Age, at both ends. Unicode puts the whole span in one sentence: use of the script "covers a period from the first century to the nineteenth century", and "some 6,000 Runic inscriptions are known."

Omniglot fills in the middle. The younger futhark "stabilized by about 800 A.D., the beginning of the Viking Age", and "was the main alphabet in Norway, Sweden and Denmark throughout the Viking Age, but was largely though not completely replaced by the Latin alphabet by about 1200."

Then the tail nobody expects. After Christianity reached Scandinavia, "the Runic alphabet was Latinised and was used occasionally, mainly for decoration, until 1850."

Eighteen fifty. Both our sources agree runes were still being cut in the nineteenth century, which is our favourite fact on this page and the reason we would rather you did not file them as purely ancient.

Frequently asked questions

How many runes are in the Elder Futhark?

Twenty-four. The Unicode Standard states that "the original old futhark contained 24 runes". A later, simplified younger futhark cut that to sixteen, and a separate English and Frisian branch added seven more runes between the fifth and ninth centuries.

Why does the translator use 26 runes?

Because it is keyed to the English alphabet rather than to any historical futhark. The old futhark had 24 signs and the younger one 16, so neither matches A to Z. Assigning one sign per letter is what lets everything you type survive a round trip.

Why can't it write the word "futhark"?

Because the third sound in that name is a single rune, Thurisaz, and English writes it with the two letters T and H. Our keys are Latin letters, so it produces two runes there instead of one. Our K is also the younger form, Kaun, rather than the older Kauna the name uses.

Are all 26 of these real runes?

Unicode records traditional Germanic names for seventeen of them, often several names for one sign. For the other nine, C, D, G, O, Q, V, X, Y and Z, the name stops at the bare Latin letter. For three of those nine there is a traditionally named rune in the same block that this chart declined to use, so the gap is at least partly a matter of which code points we selected.

When did people stop using runes?

Later than most people assume. Unicode dates runic use from the first century to the nineteenth, and Omniglot says that after Christianity reached Scandinavia the alphabet "was Latinised and was used occasionally, mainly for decoration, until 1850."

Type your name into the box above, then try FUTHARK and count the glyphs. For the opposite failure mode, Ogham collapses four of your letters onto shared signs and Phoenician six, while the rest of the scripts each bend in a direction of their own.

Sources