Odal (rune)

Name
	"heritage, estate"
Shape	Elder Futhark	Futhorc
Unicode	ᛟ U+16DF
Transliteration	o	œ
Transcription	o, ō	œ, oe, ōe
IPA	[o(ː)]	[eː], [ø(ː)]
Position in rune-row	23 or 24

The Elder Futhark Odal rune (ᛟ), also known as the Othala rune, represents the o sound. Its reconstructed Proto-Germanic name is *ōþalan "heritage; inheritance, inherited estate".

It was in use for epigraphy during the 3rd to the 8th centuries. It is not continued in the Younger Futhark, disappearing from the Scandinavian record around the 6th century, but it survived in the Anglo-Saxon Futhorc, and expressed the Old English œ phoneme during the 7th and 8th centuries. Its name is attested as ēðel in the Anglo-Saxon manuscript tradition.

The rune is encoded in Unicode at codepoint U+16DF: ᛟ.

The Common Germanic stem ōþala- or ōþila- "inherited estate" is an ablaut variant of the stem aþal-. It consists of a root aþ- and a suffix -ila- or -ala-. The suffix variant accounts for the umlauted form ēþel. Germanic aþal‑ had a meaning of (approximately) "nobility", and the derivation aþala‑ could express "lineage, (noble) race, descent, kind", and thus "nobleman, prince" (whence Old English atheling), but also "inheritance, inherited estate, property, possession". Its etymology is not clear, but it is usually compared to atta "father" (cf. the name Attila, ultimately baby talk for "father").

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