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
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“Systematic philosophical and practical anti-intellectualism such as we are witnessing appears to be something truly novel in the history of human culture.”
—Johan Huizinga (1872–1945)
“No matter how vital experience might be while you lived it, no sooner was it ended and dead than it became as lifeless as the piles of dry dust in a school history book.”
—Ellen Glasgow (1874–1945)
“The whole history of civilisation is strewn with creeds and institutions which were invaluable at first, and deadly afterwards.”
—Walter Bagehot (1826–1877)