Runes RU'NES, n. plu. Gothic poetry or rhymes.

Runes a name given to the letters of the alphabet by heathen Teutonic tribes prior to their coming under the influence of Roman civilisation; are formed almost invariably of straight lines, and scarcely exist except in inscriptions dating back to A.D. 1; found chiefly in Scandinavia, also in Britain. There are three runic alphabets (much alike), the oldest being the Gothic of 24 letters or runes. They are now believed to have first come into use among the Goths in the 6th century B.C., and to be a modified form of the old Greek alphabet introduced by traders.

runes pl.n. 1. Anything that requires heavy wizardry or black art to parse: core dumps, JCL commands, APL, or code in a language you haven't a clue how to read. Not quite as bad as line noise, but close. Compare casting the runes, Great Runes. 2. Special display characters (for example, the high-half graphics on an IBM PC). 3. [borderline techspeak] 16-bit characters from the Unicode multilingual character set.

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