Æ (minuscule: æ) is a grapheme named aesc or ash, formed from the letters a and e. Originally a ligature representing a Latin diphthong, it has been promoted to the full status of a letter in the alphabets of some languages, including Norwegian, Danish, Icelandic and Faroese. As a letter of the Old English Latin alphabet, it was called æsc ("ash tree") after the Anglo-Saxon futhorc rune  (), which it transliterated; its traditional name in English is still ash . It was also used in Old Swedish before being changed to ä. Variants include Ǣ ǣ Ǽ ǽ.