Full rune descriptions in your pocket whenever you need them. In one app.
Turn any English name or word into runes with the rune converter below. Type into the box and your text appears instantly in six historical runic alphabets at once, from the 24-rune Elder Futhark of the Migration Period to the 28-rune Anglo-Saxon Futhorc used to write Old English. This tool transliterates, swapping each letter for its closest historical rune; it is not a translator, and that distinction matters if you want a genuine Old Norse inscription rather than an English word simply spelled in runes.
This is a transliteration tool, not a translation tool. Runes are an alphabet: a way of writing down sounds, the same way the Latin alphabet writes down English. Typing an English word swaps each letter for the closest matching rune in each of six alphabets; it does not turn your English text into Old Norse or Old English, which are entirely different languages with their own grammar and vocabulary. A genuine Viking Age inscription would need its words translated into Old Norse first, and only then transliterated into runes.
Using the converter takes four steps.
Each chart below lists every rune in one historical alphabet next to the English letters it stands in for. Use them to check what a single rune means, to see how sparse the 16-rune Younger Futhark is next to the 28-rune Anglo-Saxon Futhorc, or simply to read an alphabet directly without typing anything into the converter.
The six alphabets are not interchangeable historical curiosities; each belongs to a specific period, region, and set of sounds. The table below lists their date ranges, where they were used, how many runes each one has, and what each suits best.
| Alphabet | Period | Region | Runes | Best for |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Elder Futhark | c. 150-800 CE | Proto-Norse, Germanic | 24 | General use, tattoos, and the alphabet behind this site's rune-meaning pages |
| Younger Futhark | c. 800-1100 CE | Viking Age, long-branch | 16 | Viking Age recreation and formal, runestone-style inscriptions |
| Short-Twig | c. 800-1100 CE | Swedish-Norwegian runes | 16 | Everyday Viking Age writing, faster to carve than long-branch Younger Futhark |
| Staveless | c. 1000-1100 CE | Hälsinge runes | 16 | Curiosity and regional Swedish variants, not accuracy-critical projects |
| Medieval | c. 1100-1500 CE | Latin-influenced, full alphabet | 25 | Names with modern sounds the older futharks lack, such as V and separate vowels |
| Anglo-Saxon Futhorc | c. 400-1100 CE | Old English, Frisian | 28 | Anglo-Saxon and Old English names and texts |
Runes are phonetic, tied to sounds rather than to English spelling rules. A silent letter, like the K in knife, or a doubled letter, like the two Ts in letter, has no separate rune of its own, so spelling phonetically, the way a word actually sounds, produces a result closer to how a Viking Age or Anglo-Saxon writer would have carved it.
Norse and Old English dialects varied by region and period, and runic spelling was never standardised the way modern English spelling is. Two carvers in different parts of Scandinavia could render the same name with slightly different runes, and both would be historically defensible.
English has 26 letters. Five of the six runic alphabets have fewer: Elder Futhark 24, Younger Futhark, Short-Twig and Staveless all 16, and the Medieval Runerow 25. Only the Anglo-Saxon Futhorc has more, at 28, yet even it still collapses some English letters onto a single rune. C, K and Q become the same Kenaz rune in five of the six alphabets, the Medieval Runerow being the one that keeps C separate, and I and Y both become the same rune in several alphabets. This is not a limitation of the converter; it reflects genuine gaps between the English alphabet and the sound systems these scripts were built for.
Real runestones often mark the space between words with a punctuation dot, a cross, or a colon-like symbol rather than a blank space. Type an apostrophe or a colon anywhere in your text and the converter renders it as ×, the closest equivalent to that historical word divider, alongside the plain spaces it also preserves.
None of the six alphabets had dedicated symbols for digits, so numbers typed into the converter are left as plain Latin characters and marked red, the same treatment given to any unmapped letter. Historical inscriptions that needed to record a quantity wrote it out as a word or cut a separate row of tally marks rather than using a numeral system.
Four real names run through the converter, so you can see exactly what the tool outputs before typing your own.
Ragnar transliterates to ᚱᚨᚷᚾᚨᚱ in Elder Futhark. Because the whole entry ends in R, the final letter is read as the historical sound r-hooked rather than plain R; Elder Futhark uses one rune for both, so the Elder row looks unaffected, but Younger Futhark keeps them separate, so its row ends in a different rune from the one it starts with.
Bjorn transliterates to ᛒᛃᛟᚱᚾ in Elder Futhark. Every letter maps one to one here: B, J, O, R and N each have their own dedicated rune in Elder Futhark, with no digraphs or shared runes involved.
Freyja transliterates to ᚠᚱᛖᛁᛃᚨ in Elder Futhark. The Y resolves to the same rune as I, since Elder Futhark has no separate rune for Y; this is the one-to-one mapping gap covered earlier, not an error.
Sigurd transliterates to ᛊᛁᚷᚢᚱᛞ in Elder Futhark. Six letters, six runes, with no digraph or divider needed anywhere in the name.
Type your name into the converter and it appears in all six runic alphabets straight away. Each row shows one historical alphabet, so you can compare how the same name would have been carved in different centuries. Press Copy on whichever row you want to keep.
Yes, completely free, with no account, sign-up, or payment of any kind. Type as much text as you like and copy any row as many times as you need. There is no usage limit and no watermark added to the copied runes.
No. The converter runs entirely in your browser the moment the page loads, with nothing to install, no account to create, and no server round trip involved. Refreshing the page clears whatever you typed, since nothing you type is saved, logged, or sent anywhere.
Yes. Type any length of text, including full sentences and line breaks, and every character updates across all six alphabets as you type. Spaces are kept as spaces, and longer text is handled the same way a single name is.
A red letter means that alphabet had no rune for that sound. The Younger Futhark, for example, shrank to 16 runes while the language kept growing, so several sounds English writes separately had no letter of their own. The red marking is historically accurate rather than a fault.
Type an apostrophe or a colon where you want a break, and it becomes the × symbol, the closest equivalent to the word dividers carved into real runestones. Plain spaces are also preserved and display as gaps between runes, and both update instantly across all six alphabet rows as you type.
Yes. Press Copy on any row and the runes are placed on your clipboard as plain Unicode text, ready to paste into a document, a chat app, or a social media caption. No image or screenshot is involved, so the runes stay crisp and selectable wherever you paste them.
Five of the six alphabets are standard Unicode characters, so they display correctly on any modern phone, tablet, or computer with up to date fonts. The Staveless row is the exception: it uses approximated symbol characters rather than true runes, since Staveless script was never added to Unicode.
It is transliteration. Runes are an alphabet, not a language, so the tool swaps each letter for the closest historical rune rather than turning English into Old Norse. Writing a genuine Norse inscription means choosing the Norse words first, then converting those.
Each of the six alphabets developed at a different time and place, with its own set of sounds and its own number of runes. Elder Futhark has 24 runes, while Younger Futhark shrank to 16, so several English letters share a single rune in the later alphabet that had its own rune in the earlier one.
Old Norse and Old English did not distinguish these three letters the way modern English spelling does; all three represented the same hard k sound. Five of the six alphabets here use a single rune, Kenaz in Elder Futhark, for that one sound, regardless of which Latin letter you typed. The Medieval Runerow is the exception: it kept a separate rune for C and only merges K and Q together.
The English digraph TH represents one sound, and Elder Futhark, like several of the other alphabets, has a dedicated rune, Thurisaz, for exactly that sound. The converter recognises the pair of letters and swaps them for the single matching rune before matching anything else.
The converter always rewrites X to K and S before matching runes, the same two-letter breakdown Old Norse and Old English writers themselves would have used, so typing X produces two runes in every one of the six alphabets. The Anglo-Saxon Futhorc chart above is worth knowing about separately: it lists ᛘ as a rune dedicated to X on its own, but that entry is never reached through the converter itself, since the X-to-K-S rewrite always happens first.
The converter checks only the very last letter of everything you typed, not the ending of each individual word. If your whole entry ends in R, that final letter is read as a distinct historical sound, written r-hooked, which several alphabets, including Younger Futhark, gave its own separate rune.
Yes. Runes represent sounds, not English spelling conventions, so silent letters and doubled letters that exist only in written English have no separate rune of their own. Writing phonetically, the way the word actually sounds, generally produces a result closer to a historical inscription than copying English spelling exactly.
No. None of the six alphabets had digits, so numbers are left as Latin characters and marked red, the same treatment given to any other unmapped character. Norse and Anglo-Saxon inscriptions wrote quantities out as words, or used tally marks cut into the same surface, rather than a numeral system.
No, aside from the apostrophe and colon, which both produce the × word-divider symbol used on real runestones. Any other punctuation mark, such as a comma or exclamation point, has no historical rune equivalent and is left unmapped and shown in red.
Elder Futhark is the most common choice: it is the earliest and best documented alphabet, has a rune for nearly every English sound, and is the alphabet this site's individual rune-meaning pages are built around. Choose a later alphabet only if you specifically want a Viking Age, medieval, or Anglo-Saxon look.
Elder Futhark, used roughly 150 to 800 CE across the early Germanic world, has 24 runes. Younger Futhark, used in Viking Age Scandinavia from about 800 to 1100 CE, kept only 16, even as the Old Norse language grew more complex, so several distinct sounds share one rune.
Short-Twig is a variant of Younger Futhark, in use around 800 to 1100 CE mainly in Sweden and Norway, with the same 16 sounds but simplified, shorter side-strokes on several runes. It was the everyday, faster to carve alternative to the more formal long-branch Younger Futhark seen on monumental runestones.
Staveless, or Hälsinge, runes were a regional Swedish variant from around 1000 to 1100 CE that dropped the main vertical stave most runes are built around. They were never added to the Unicode standard, so this row is approximated with the closest available symbol characters rather than true rune glyphs, and should be read as an impression rather than an accurate rendering.
The Medieval Runerow was used from roughly 1100 to 1500 CE, after the Latin alphabet had arrived in Scandinavia, and expanded to 25 runes to cover sounds the earlier futharks left out. It was typically used alongside Latin script rather than replacing it entirely.
The Anglo-Saxon Futhorc was used in England and Frisia from roughly 400 to 1100 CE to write Old English. It is the largest of the six alphabets here, with 28 runes, because Old English had more distinct vowel sounds than Old Norse did.
Many people do, and Elder Futhark is the most common choice since it is the best documented of the six alphabets. Double-check the exact letters you want transliterated, since spelling mistakes are permanent, and consider having the result reviewed by someone familiar with Old Norse before booking an appointment.
Yes. Runes were originally designed to be carved into wood, bone, and stone, so their straight lines and lack of curves make them well suited to engraving at small sizes. Copy the row you want and send the plain text to your jeweller or engraver.
No, not by the period most people picture as the Viking Age. Elder Futhark belongs to the earlier Migration Period and had already given way to the 16-rune Younger Futhark, and its Short-Twig and Staveless variants, by around 800 CE, when the Viking Age is generally considered to begin.
Full rune descriptions in your pocket whenever you need them. In one app.
A short essay in plain language. We pick one rune, sit with it for a week, and write what we found. Like a letter on parchment - not another email.