Ehwaz is the nineteenth rune of the Elder Futhark, third in the third aett, carrying the phoneme "e." Its reconstructed name means horse. The Old English rune poem praises the horse as a joy to nobles, a proud animal that the wealthy trade and that comforts the restless, an image of a trusted partnership between rider and mount. Its shape resembles two joined uprights, sometimes read as a pair moving together.
Ehwaz stands third in the aett of Tyr. Its Old English futhorc counterpart, eh, meaning horse, receives a brief stanza in the Old English Rune Poem describing the horse as a joy to noblemen in the presence of warriors, a steed proud on its hooves, when wealthy men on horseback exchange speech about it, and it is ever a comfort to the restless. Ehwaz is one of the eight Elder Futhark runes with no surviving Younger Futhark counterpart, so it is attested only in the Old English poem.
Runologists reconstruct the Proto-Germanic form behind the name as *ehwaz, 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. No inscription attests Ehwaz being used for anything beyond its ordinary phonetic value.