Word.ws English Dictionary

rune

/ɹuːn/

rune noun: a letter, or character, used in the written language of various ancient Germanic peoples, especially the Scandinavians and the Anglo-Saxons. Also the alternative form of roun.

rune: a letter, or character, used in the written language of various ancient Germanic peoples,...
Image: Rursus, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Noun

rune (plural runes)

  1. 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.1922, Eleanour Sinclair Rohde, The Old English Herbals, London: Longmans, Green and Co., page 14
    • 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.1970, Richard Hamer, editor, A Choice of Anglo-Saxon Verse, Croydon: Faber & Faber, →ISBN, page 76
  2. A letter from any visually similar script, such as Hungarian runes (the Old Hungarian script) or Turkic runes (the Old Turkic script).
  3. A Finnic or Scandinavian epic poem, or a division of one, especially a division of the Kalevala.
  4. 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...1924, Lord Dunsany, chapter III, in The King of Elfland's Daughter, New York: G.P. Puttnam's Sons, page 30
    • "Finding you somewhere to live isn't going to be easy," he said. "We must cast the runes," said Catweazle. "They will tell us."1971, Richard Carpenter, Catweazle and the Magic Zodiac, Harmondsworth: Puffin Books, page 32
  5. A verse or song, especially one with mystical or mysterious overtones; a spell or an incantation.
    • 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.1895 June 22, Louis Wain, “Owls”, in Illustrated London News, volume 106, number 2931, page 28
    • the fiddle sang and sang as ceaselessly as the chanting cicada without, and the frogs intoning their sylvan runes by the waterside.1891, Mary Noailles Murfree (as Charles Egbert Craddock), In the "Stranger People's" Country, Nebraska, published 2005, page 15
  6. A Unicode code point.
    • Go language defines the type rune as an alias for the type int32 to represent a Unicode code point. A string in Go is a sequence of runes.2016, Shiju Varghese, Go Recipes, Apress, →ISBN, page 12

Verb

rune (third-person singular simple present runes, present participle runing, simple past and past participle runed)

  1. (dated, intransitive, poetic) To compose or perform poetry or songs.

Also used as

rune is also the alternative form of roun.

rune meaning in Tamil, Bengali, Telugu and Malayalam

rune in Tamil

ரூன்

rune in Bengali

রুনে

rune in Telugu

రూన్, రూనె

rune in Malayalam

റൂൺ
More languagesFewer languages
rune in Kannada
ರೂನ್, ರೂನೆ
rune in Nepali
रुने
rune in Thai
อักษรรูน

Examples of rune in a sentence

  • These difficult runes are written in Elvish.
  • Hold up the stone and trace the Algiz rune in the air before you.
  • Through this rune of compassion, feelings of pain are transferred from the dedicates to Fallion.

All 33 example sentences with rune

Synonyms of rune

8 more synonymsFewer synonyms

All synonyms of rune

Forms of rune

Noun
pluralrunes
Verb
third-person singular presentrunes
present participleruning
past participleruned
pastruned

Plural of rune: runes

Origin of rune

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 ; "code point"

Words formed from rune

Phrases with rune

Words that rhyme with rune

48 more rhymesFewer rhymes

Questions about rune

What does rune mean?
Rune means a letter, or character, used in the written language of various ancient Germanic peoples, especially the Scandinavians and the Anglo-Saxons.
What is rune in Tamil?
Rune in Tamil is ரூன். See Rune meaning in Tamil.
What part of speech is rune?
Rune can be a noun or a verb.
How do you pronounce rune?
Rune is pronounced /ɹuːn/.
What is the plural of rune?
The plural of rune is runes.

Words near rune in the dictionary

  1. Rundquist
  2. Rundquists
  3. Rundqvist
  4. Runds
  5. Rundu
  6. rune
  7. rune bag
  8. rune bags
  9. rune book
  10. rune books
  11. rune cloth

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: rune (page history and authors); rune (Tamil, IndicTrans2 machine translation) (model and license); rune (Bengali, IndicTrans2 machine translation) (model and license); rune (Telugu, IndicTrans2 machine translation) (model and license); rune (Malayalam, IndicTrans2 machine translation) (model and license); rune (Kannada, IndicTrans2 machine translation) (model and license); rune (Nepali, IndicTrans2 machine translation) (model and license). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

Last updated:

Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: En-us-rune.ogg.

Cite this entry: “rune.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/rune. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.