When describing rune-forms, some conventional terms will be employed. A stave is a vertical stroke, usually spanning the entire height of the line. Most other parts of the character can be described as branches. These are usually straight, though sometimes slightly curving, and rarely horizontal. If the ends of two branches from the same stave meet so that they form a closed loop, they might both epigraphically and in manuscripts be drawn as a semicircle. The final element type is the dot, which might take the form of a point only slightly wider than the other strokes, but when on a stave also a short horizontal stroke.
Ligatures formed by placing the branches of more than one rune on a single stave occur both epigraphically and in manuscripts, these are called bind-runes.
| Normal | ʀᴜɴᴇ | |
| Inverted | ʁᴜɴᴇ | individual rune mirrored along the horizontal axis |
| Turned | ᴚᴜɴᴇ | individual rune rotated 180° |
| Reversed | ᴙᴜɴᴇ | individual rune mirrored along the vertical axis |
| Retrograde | ⱻᴎᴜᴙ | sequence of runes, collectively mirrored along the vertical axis and read backwards |
One might come across the terms stuprune for an inverted or turned rune and venderune for a reversed rune or a normal rune in retrograde text.
Tor Gjerde