Nauthiz is the tenth rune of the Elder Futhark, second in the second aett, carrying the phoneme "n." Its reconstructed name means need, necessity or distress. The rune poems treat need as a hard master that nonetheless can help and heal those who heed it in time, an image of constraint that teaches endurance. The rune was also linked in later charm tradition with warding and with fire kindled by friction.
Nauthiz stands second in the aett of Hagal. Its Old English futhorc counterpart, nyd, meaning need or distress, receives a stanza in the Old English Rune Poem describing need as constricting the heart, yet often becoming, for the sons of men, a help and salvation if they heed it in time. Nauthiz survived into the Younger Futhark as naud, and appears in both the Norwegian and Icelandic Rune Poems, where it is likewise associated with constraint and hardship.
Runologists reconstruct the Proto-Germanic form behind the name as *nauþiz, 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 surviving inscription uses Nauthiz outside its ordinary role as a written phoneme within a name or short text.