Ruby character

Ruby characters (ルビ, rubi^?) are small, annotative glosses that can be placed above or to the right of a Chinese character when writing languages with logographic characters such as Chinese, Japanese, or Korean to show the pronunciation. Typically called just ruby or rubi, such annotations are used as pronunciation guides for characters that are likely to be unfamiliar to the reader.

Here is an example of Japanese ruby characters (called furigana) for Tokyo ("東京"):

Most furigana (Japanese ruby characters) are written with the hiragana syllabary, but katakana and romaji are also occasionally used. Alternatively, sometimes foreign words (usually English) are printed with furigana implying the meaning, and vice versa. Textbooks usually write on-readings with katakana and kun-readings with hiragana.

Here is an example of the Chinese ruby characters for Beijing ("北京"):

In Taiwan, the syllabary used for Chinese ruby characters is Zhuyin fuhao (also known as Bopomofo); in mainland China pinyin is used. Typically, unlike the example shown above, zhuyin is used with a vertical traditional writing and zhuyin is written on the right side of the characters. In mainland China, horizontal script is used and ruby characters (pinyin) are written above the Chinese characters.

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