Primary
''rune'' ▫ᴱᴺ｜Definition｜1st｜20260331180822-00-⌔
rune - Wiktionary, the free dictionary
English
Noun
rune (plural runes)
- A letter, or character, used in the written language of various ancient Germanic peoples, especially the Scandinavians and the Anglo-Saxons.
- ✤ Yet they made for man those mystic swords of superhuman workmanship engraved with magic runes and dipped when red hot in blood or in a broth of poisonous herbs and twigs.1
- ✤ * Runes were the letters of an ancient Germanic alphabet, ultimately derived from the Mediterranean alphabets, which was used for carving on wood or stone and which to some extent survived the introduction of writing.*2
- A letter from any visually similar script, such as Hungarian runes (the Old Hungarian script) or Turkic runes (the Old Turkic script).
- A Finnic or Scandinavian epic poem, or a division of one, especially a division of the Kalevala.
- A letter or mark used as a mystical or magic symbol.
- ✤ And the sword that had visited Earth from so far away smote like the falling of thunderbolts […] and the runes in Alveric’s far-travelled sword exulted, and roared at the elf-knight; until in the dark of the wood, amongst branches severed from disenchanted trees, with a blow like that of a thunderbolt riving an oak-tree, Alveric slew him.3
- ✤ “Finding you somewhere to live isn’t going to be easy,” he said. “We must cast the runes,” said Catweazle. “They will tell us.”4
- ✤ “Are the, um, eldritch runes supposed to glow like that?” “Dunno. I asked the distributor about ‘em and he started shaking really fast like in a Tool video.”5
- A verse or song, especially one with mystical or mysterious overtones; a spell or an incantation.
- ✤ Synonyms: enchantment, hex; see also Thesaurus: magic spell
- ✤ Where the daylight peeps thro’ like the glint of the Moon,/And the branches are rustling a murmurous rune,/The Owls sit in council like prophets of Fate,/Discussing grave questions of Kingdom and State.6
- ✤ the fiddle sang and sang as ceaselessly as the chanting cicada without, and the frogs intoning their sylvan runes by the waterside.7
- (obsolete) Alternative form of roun (“secret or mystery”).
- (programming, in the Go programming language) A Unicode code point.
- ✤ Go language defines the type
**rune**as an alias for the typeint32to represent a Unicode code point. A string in Go is a sequence of runes.8Verb
rune (third-person singular simple present runes, present participle runing, simple past and past participle runed)
- (intransitive, poetic, dated) To compose or perform poetry or songs.
Etymology
Borrowed from Old Norse rún, which is from Proto-Germanic ﹡rūnō (“letter, literature, secret”), which is borrowed either from Proto-Celtic ﹡rūnā or from the same source as it; compare Dutch rune, German Rune, Raune, Danish rune and Swedish runa. Compare roun.
Finnic epic poem
- ✤ Semantic loan from Finnish runo.
”code point”
- ✤ Suggested by Ken Thompson for use in Plan 9.9
Pronunciation
- enPR: ro͞on, IPA: /ɹuːn/
- Audio (US): 🔊
- Rhymes: -uːn
Printed 2026-06-28.
(echo:: @ ⌗)
Link to original Footnotes
1922, Eleanour Sinclair Rohde, The Old English Herbals, London: Longmans, Green and Co., page 14: ↩
1970, Richard Hamer, editor, A Choice of Anglo-Saxon Verse, Croydon: Faber & Faber, →ISBN, page 76: ↩
1924, Lord Dunsany, chapter III, in The King of Elfland’s Daughter, New York: G.P. Puttnam’s Sons, page 30: ↩
1971, Richard Carpenter, Catweazle and the Magic Zodiac, Harmondsworth: Puffin Books, page 32: ↩
2016, Jeph Jacques, Questionable Content (webcomic), Number 3242: The Dunkelest Brau: ↩
1895 June 22, Louis Wain, “Owls”, in Illustrated London News, volume 106, number 2931, page 28: ↩
1891, Mary Noailles Murfree (as Charles Egbert Craddock), In the “Stranger People’s” Country, Nebraska, published 2005, page 15: ↩
2016, Shiju Varghese, Go Recipes, Apress, →ISBN, page 12: ↩
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