Skip to main content

The Old Hungarian Alphabet

Every letter of the Rovás script — the ancient runic alphabet of the Hungarians. Vowels, consonants, ligatures, and numerals, each a real Unicode character you can copy and use.

The Old Hungarian alphabet — called Rovás or Rovásírás — is the ancient runic script of the Hungarian people. Unlike the Latin alphabet used to write Hungarian today, Rovás was built for the sounds of the Hungarian language itself: it gives a single letter to every sound, including ones that take two Latin letters, such as sz, cs, gy, and ny. The full alphabet has more than forty signs, was traditionally carved into wood, bone, and stone, and is read from right to left.

Because each rune stands for a Hungarian sound rather than a Latin letter, the alphabet is the key to everything else here. Below is the complete set — vowels and consonants — followed by the traditional ligatures and the Rovás numerals. Every sign is a real Unicode character (block U+10C80–U+10CFF), so you can copy any of them and use them anywhere. (Note: these are the Hungarian runes, not the Norse or Viking runes of the Elder Futhark — a different writing system entirely.)

Vowels

aa
áah
ee
éeh
ii
íee
oo
óoh
öoe
őoeh
uu
úoo
üue
űueh

Consonants

bb
cts
csch
dd
ff
gg
gydy
hh
jy
kk
ll
lyy
mm
nn
nyny
pp
rr
ssh
szs
tt
tyty
vv
zz
zszh

Ligatures

Some sounds were written by joining two runes into a single carved sign. These ligatures cover letters borrowed for foreign words — q, w, x, y — and the doubled sounds dz and dzs.

dzdz
dzsj
qkv
wv
xks
yi/y

Numerals

Rovás had its own numerals, written much like Roman numerals: the larger values come first and are added together. For example, 145 is written as 100 + 10 + 10 + 10 + 10 + 5.

1000ezer
100száz
50ötven
10tíz
5öt
1egy