*Ehwaz is the reconstructed Proto-Germanic name of the Elder Futhark e rune, meaning "horse" (cognate to Latin equus, Gaulish epos, Tocharian B yakwe, Sanskrit , Avestan and Old Irish ech). In the Anglo-Saxon futhorc, it is continued as eh (properly eoh, but spelled without the diphthong to avoid confusion with ēoh "yew"). The Proto-Germanic vowel system was asymmetric and unstable. The difference between the long vowels expressed by e and ï (sometimes transcribed as *ē1 and *ē2) was lost. The Younger Futhark continues neither, lacking a letter expressing e altogether. The Anglo-Saxon futhorc faithfully preserved all Elder futhorc staves, but assigned new sound values to the redundant ones, futhorc ēoh expressing a diphthong. In the case of the Gothic alphabet, where the names of the runes were re-applied to letters derived from the Greek alphabet, the letter 𐌴 e was named "horse" as well (note that in Gothic orthography, ⟨aí⟩ represents monophthongic /e/). The rune may have been an original innovation, or it may have been adapted from the classical Latin alphabet's E.

Anglo-Saxon rune poem

The Anglo-Saxon rune poem has: