Gebo is the seventh rune of the Elder Futhark, carrying the phoneme "g" and standing seventh in the first aett. Its reconstructed name means gift, and the rune is drawn as an X, a shape that itself suggests exchange. The Old English rune poem praises generosity as bringing honor and support. In Germanic culture gift-giving carried obligation and bound giver and receiver together, so the rune gathers the ideas of gift, exchange, hospitality and partnership.
Gebo stands eighth in the aett of Freyr, closing the Elder Futhark's first group. Its Old English futhorc counterpart, gyfu, meaning gift, receives a stanza in the Old English Rune Poem describing a gift as an honour and a support to men's worth, bringing help and sustenance to those who otherwise have nothing. Gebo is one of the eight Elder Futhark runes that did not survive, even in altered form, into the reduced sixteen-character Younger Futhark, so it appears only in the Old English Rune Poem among the three surviving poems, with no Norwegian or Icelandic stanza to compare it against.
Runologists reconstruct the Proto-Germanic form behind the name as *gebō, 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.