Stan
The thirty-second futhorc rune, transliterated st, and the one most often left off modern charts. It completes the 33-rune row of the manuscripts, and appears in no carved inscription.
At a glance
- Rune
- ᛥU+16E5
- Unicode name
- RUNIC LETTER STAN
- Alphabet
- Anglo-Saxon Futhorc
- In use
- c. AD 400 – 1100 (Early medieval England and Frisia)
- Position
- 32
- Transliteration
- st
- Sound value
- /st/
- Name
- stan: stoneAttested
Names
How the rune is called in each tradition, and how securely each name is recorded.
| Form | Language | Meaning | Evidence |
|---|---|---|---|
| stan | Old English | stone | Attested |
An asterisk marks a reconstructed form: a word linguists have worked backwards to, not one that appears in any surviving source.
Etymology
Sound value
A /st/ cluster carried on a single sign: two sounds on one stave, in the same way cweorð carries /kw/. That is an unusual thing for an alphabet to do, and it is part of why the rune saw so little practical use.
Historical use
A pseudo-rune, in Page's sense: it sits second from the end of the 33-rune row in Cotton Domitian A.ix and turns up in related late English alphabet lists, but in no inscription cut in wood or stone. Stan-like shapes do occur on the Westeremden yew-stick, though they are usually read as Spiegelrunen (mirrored forms of ᛒ and ᛈ) rather than as this rune.
Attested in
Objects and monuments where this rune can actually be seen.
- Manuscript futhorc rowsEngland · 10th–11th century
Cotton Domitian A.ix and the alphabet lists related to it, where stan is the thirty-second of 33 runes. There is no rune-poem stanza for it.
- Westeremden yew-stickGroningen, Netherlands · Second half of the 8th century
The one object regularly offered as inscriptional evidence for this rune. The shapes on it are better read as Spiegelrunen, which is why stan stays a manuscript character.
Signatures follow the Scandinavian Runic-text Database so you can look each inscription up directly. Each name links to the object's own entry.
Modern meaning
Why this entry has none.
None is given here. Modern rune divination is built almost entirely on the Elder Futhark, and no established modern tradition reads the Anglo-Saxon Futhorc separately. Inventing a reading for Stan to fill the space would be exactly the kind of fabrication this site exists to flag, so the field is left empty rather than filled. How modern rune meanings were arrived at is a separate discussion.
Common misconceptions
Claims about this rune that circulate widely and do not hold up.
Stan is routinely dropped from modern futhorc charts, which then reach a total of 33 by counting cealc instead. Cealc is a doubled form of calc and does not belong to that row; stan does.
Sources for this entry
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