U+16D6 RUNIC LETTER EHWAZ EH E

U+16D6 was added to Unicode in version 3.0 (1999). It belongs to the block Runic in the Basic Multilingual Plane.

This character is a Other Letter and is mainly used in the Runic script.

The glyph is not a composition. It has a Neutral East Asian Width. In bidirectional context it acts as Left To Right and is not mirrored. The glyph can, under circumstances, be confused with 36 other glyphs. In text U+16D6 behaves as Alphabetic regarding line breaks. It has type OLetter for sentence and ALetter for word breaks. The Grapheme Cluster Break is Any.

The Wikipedia has the following information about this codepoint:

*Ehwaz is the reconstructed Proto-Germanic name of the Elder Futhark e rune ᛖ, meaning "horse" (cognate to Latin equus, Sanskrit aśva, Avestan aspa and Old Irish ech). In the Anglo-Saxon futhorc, it is continued as ᛖ eh (properly eoh, but spelled without the diphthong to avoid confusion with ᛇ ēoh "yew").

The Proto-Germanic vowel system was asymmetric and unstable. The difference between the long vowels expressed by ᛖ e and ᛇ ï (sometimes transcribed as *ē₁ and *ē₂) were 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 aíƕus "horse" as well (note that in Gothic orthography, <aí> represents monophthongic /e/).