History
In British typography, ruby was originally the name for type with a height of 5.5 points, which printers used for interlinear annotations in printed documents. In Japanese, rather than referring to a font size, the word became the name for typeset furigana. When transliterated back into English, some texts rendered the word as rubi, (a typical romanization of the Japanese word ルビ). However, the spelling "ruby" has become more common since the W3C published a recommendation for ruby markup. In the US, the font size had been called "agate", at least before the 1950s:
agate: An old name for a size of type slightly smaller than five and one-half points, … . Called ruby in England.
— Marjorie E. Skillin, et al., Words into Type, 1948, p. 538
Read more about this topic: Ruby Character
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