What ᚮ means
It represents the spoken o vowel.
ᚮ descends from ᚨ, fourth in the older Germanic rune row. Its reconstructed name *ansuz meant “god.” By the 11th century, nasal a (spoken through the nose) shifted to o, giving this form.
Icelandic rune poetry reads óss as “river mouth”; Codex Runicus, a rune-written law book around 1300, shows the row.
Don't confuse it with
1Questions people ask
1Why does ᚮ look different in fonts?
Font design: branch angles and proportions can vary.
How to type ᚮ
Windows (Word)
Alt+XType 16AE, then Alt+X to get ᚮ.
Windows
Win+Rrun charmap for the full table, or use the emoji picker's Ω symbols tab (Win + .).
macOS
Control+Command+SpaceOpen the character viewer and search “runic letter o”.
Linux
Ctrl+Shift+UType 16ae, then Enter or Space.
HTML
ᚮCSS
\16AEHow to type ᚮ
Enter 16AE in a hex-capable Unicode editor and convert, or use a runic-font character viewer.
Codes and encoding1 code points
HTML decimal
ᚮ
HTML hex
ᚮ
CSS content
content: "\16AE";
Each escape is closed by the next backslash; a trailing space is needed before a literal hex digit.
URL encoded
%E1%9A%AE
1
On screen
1
Code points
1
JS .length
3
UTF-8 bytes
A visible symbol can contain several code points. JS .length counts UTF-16 units; UTF-8 counts bytes.