Ehwaz

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Name	Proto-Germanic	Old English
	*Ehwaz	E(o)h
	"horse"
Shape	Elder Futhark	Futhorc
Unicode	ᛖ U+16D6
Transliteration	e
Transcription	e
IPA	[e(ː)]
Position in rune-row	19

This article contains runic characters. Without proper rendering support, you may see question marks, boxes, or other symbols instead of runes.

*Ehwaz is the reconstructed Proto-Germanic name of the Elder Futhark e rune ᛖ, meaning "horse" (cognate to Latin equus, Gaulish epos, Tocharian B yakwe, Sanskrit aśva, Avestan aspa and Old Irish ech). In the Anglo-Saxon futhorc, it is continued as ᛖ eh (properly eoh, but spelled without the diphthong to avoid confusion with ᛇ ēoh "yew").

The Proto-Germanic vowel system was asymmetric and unstable. The difference between the long vowels expressed by ᛖ e and ᛇ ï (sometimes transcribed as *ē₁ and *ē₂) was lost. The Younger Futhark continues neither, lacking a letter expressing e altogether. The Anglo-Saxon futhorc faithfully preserved all Elder futhorc staves, but assigned new sound values to the redundant ones, futhorc ēoh expressing a diphthong.

In the case of the Gothic alphabet, where the names of the runes were re-applied to letters derived from the Greek alphabet, the letter 𐌴 e was named aíƕus "horse" as well (note that in Gothic orthography, ⟨aí⟩ represents monophthongic /e/).

The rune may have been an original innovation, or it may have been adapted from the classical Latin alphabet's E.^{[citation needed]}