How to use the translator
- Pick a rune row: Elder Futhark, Younger Futhark or Anglo-Saxon.
- Type a name, a word or a short message in the English box. The runes appear as you type.
- Tick Dots between words to put the single dot that many inscriptions used between words, instead of a space.
- Press Copy to paste the runes into a message or a document, or Save as PNG for an image.
- To read runes, press the arrows between the two labels and paste them. If you paste runes into the English box, the translator offers to switch for you.
TH and NG become one rune where the row has one: thorn for TH, and ingwaz or ing for NG. Numbers and punctuation have no rune, so they stay as they are.
The Elder Futhark
The Elder Futhark is the oldest rune row, with 24 runes used from about AD 150 to 800. Its name comes from the sounds of its first six runes: F, U, TH, A, R, K. The rune names are reconstructed Proto-Germanic words, and each one is also a word with a meaning, from fehu, cattle or wealth, to dagaz, day. Tap a rune to copy it.
English letters with no rune of their own borrow the closest one:
- C, K and Q all use kauną, the K rune.
- V and W use wunjō, the W rune.
- Y uses jēra, the rune for the sound of Y in "yes".
- X is written with two runes, K and S.
- Eihwaz (yew tree) has no clear English sound. It reads back as ï, the letter runologists use for it.
The Younger Futhark: Viking runes
From the 8th century, Scandinavians wrote with a shorter row of 16 runes, the Younger Futhark, which is what Viking Age rune stones use. With fewer runes, each one stood for several sounds. The translator uses the long-branch forms, also called Danish runes.
- One rune covers K, G, C and Q, one T and D, and one B and P.
- The U rune also writes O sounds, V and W. The I rune also writes E, and the translator uses it for J and Y.
- NG is written as N plus K, and Z as S.
- Ýr, the last rune, stood for an R sound at the end of words. It reads back as R.
The Anglo-Saxon futhorc
In England and Frisia, the runes grew to 28 or more to fit the sounds of Old English. The row is called the futhorc, because its fourth rune, ōs, had come to stand for O. The names here are Old English words; their meanings come from the Old English rune poem.
- C, K and Q use cēn, the torch rune.
- V uses feoh, the F rune: in Old English, F between vowels was said like V.
- X uses eolh, which runologists write as x.
- Æ uses æsc, and ēar stands for the EA sound. Ēar reads back as ea.
What the rune names mean
Every rune has a name, and every name is a word: the first rune of all three rows is the word for wealth or cattle, and many runes keep the same idea across rows, such as ice, hail, need and birch. The meanings in the charts come from the rune poems and from the reconstructed names. Modern books often give runes extra meanings for divination; those mostly come from the 20th century, not from the old inscriptions.
Reading runes back
Paste runes in the other direction to see them as letters. The translator reads the runes of the row you picked first, then any other row, so a mixed rune set still reads. Common variants also read: short-twig Younger Futhark runes, the dotted runes of the Middle Ages, and the Anglo-Saxon calc and gār. Runes for several letters read as their main sound, and the word dots become spaces.
A little history
The earliest secure runic inscriptions date from about AD 150, on small objects such as combs and weapons. Runes were cut into wood, bone, metal and stone, which is why they are made of straight lines with almost no curves. The Younger Futhark carried runic writing through the Viking Age, and the futhorc was used in England until the 11th century, alongside the Latin alphabet that eventually replaced both. Runes were added to Unicode in 1999, which is what lets you copy and paste them today.
For another script you can copy and paste, try the Egyptian hieroglyphics translator or the cuneiform translator.