Raidho is the fifth rune of the Elder Futhark, carrying the phoneme "r" and standing fifth in the first aett. Its reconstructed name means riding or a ride, the journey on horseback or by wagon. The rune poems dwell on the contrast between how easy riding looks to one indoors and how hard it is on the road, an image that ties the rune to travel, motion and, by extension, to right order and the proper course of things.
Raidho stands fifth in the aett of Freyr. Its Old English futhorc counterpart, rad, meaning riding or a journey, receives a stanza in the Old English Rune Poem describing riding as easy for a warrior indoors but strenuous for one who sits a powerful horse over long miles, a stanza built on the practical experience of travel rather than on myth. Raidho survived into the Younger Futhark as reid, retaining essentially the same sense, and appears in both the Norwegian and Icelandic Rune Poems, where it is likewise associated with the seat of a rider and with travel.
Runologists reconstruct the Proto-Germanic form behind the name as *raidō, 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.