Dagaz is the twenty-third rune of the Elder Futhark, seventh in the third aett, carrying the phoneme "d." Its reconstructed name means day. The Old English rune poem calls day the messenger of the gods, the light of the Lord that brings joy and hope to rich and poor alike, an image of dawn and the daily return of light. In some orderings Dagaz and the rune Othala change places at the end of the row.
Dagaz stands seventh in the aett of Tyr. Its Old English futhorc counterpart, daeg, meaning day, receives a stanza in the Old English Rune Poem describing day as the Lord's messenger, dear to men, the glorious light of the creator, a source of hope and happiness to rich and poor alike, and serviceable to all. Dagaz is one of the eight Elder Futhark runes with no surviving Younger Futhark counterpart, attested only in the Old English poem.
Runologists reconstruct the Proto-Germanic form behind the name as *dagaz, part of the comparative linguistic evidence, alongside cognate vocabulary across the older Germanic languages, used to establish the name's original sense independent of the later rune poems themselves. Dagaz's shape, an angular figure sometimes read as two triangles meeting at a point, is occasionally connected by runologists to the idea of light meeting dark at dawn and dusk, though this reading of the shape itself is interpretive rather than attested in any surviving source.