Nicknames for Ruby
32 ideas for Ruby — the short forms people actually use, plus cute, funny and gamer versions. Copy any of them in one click.
- Rubes the friend version, near-universal
- Roo the warm nursery clip
- Ru the tightest clip
- Rubs the blunter friend form
- Ruby Jean the old American double name
- Roo-Bear the usual affectionate pattern
- Rubi the Portuguese and Spanish spelling
- Rubí the Spanish spelling with the accent
- Rubina the Italian and Urdu elaborated form
- Ruby-Lou the rhyming family extension
- Rubie the ie spelling
- Ruby-Rose the standard compound
- Ruby-Mae the Southern double name
- Ruby-Jane the other common pairing
- Roo-Roo doubled, family use
- Rubs-a-Dub the nursery rhyme version
- Gem what the name is, said plainly
- R initial only, in group chats
- Ru-Ru doubled, family use
- Ruby Tuesday the song joke, and it is always made
- Red the colour, used as a nickname
- Roobs the phonetic spelling of Rubes
- Ruby-Bug family pet name
- Rubina-Lou the elaborated family form
- Slippers the Wizard of Oz joke, said once
- Rub Ruby, cut where people naturally stop saying it.
- Rubo Ruby with the ending people add when they like you.
- Regal Ruby Shares the "R" sound with Ruby.
- Rogue Ruby Shares the "R" sound with Ruby.
- Rubu Ruby with the ending people add when they like you.
- Radiant Ruby Shares the "R" sound with Ruby.
- Rapid Ruby Shares the "R" sound with Ruby.
About the name Ruby.
Corundum coloured red by chromium is a ruby, and the Latin ruber, red, is where both the stone and the name begin. Gemstone names were an Edwardian craze, and this was the biggest of them, sitting in the American top thirty in the 1900s, above Pearl and well above Opal. It then declined for seventy uninterrupted years and was close to vanishing by 1980. The comeback has been far stronger in Britain and Australia, where the name has spent years in the top twenty, than in the United States, where it has recovered to a respectable but unspectacular position. July babies still get it as a birthstone name.
Bright, round and a little cheeky, with an ending vowel that keeps it informal no matter how it is used. It never sounds grand, which is unusual for a jewel name. Rubes is the standard affectionate form and sounds like something a sibling would say. Roo is the small-child version.
Most popular around 2020. Based on US birth records.
- Origin
- Latin
- Meaning
- red gemstone
- Syllables
- Ru·by
- Used as
- a girls’ name
Ruby around the world.
These are the real forms Ruby takes in other languages, which often make excellent nicknames in their own right.
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Rubí
Spanish
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Rubina
Italian
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Rubi
Portuguese
Famous people called Ruby.
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Ruby Bridges
desegregated a New Orleans school
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Ruby Dee
American actress and activist
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Ruby Rose
Australian actress and model
Questions about the name Ruby
What does Ruby mean? +
The red gemstone, from Latin ruber. In the Book of Proverbs a good wife is priced above rubies, a line that gave the word a moral weight in English long before anyone used it as a name. It is the birthstone for July.
What do people shorten it to? +
Rubes is easily the most common and works as both an affectionate and a teasing form. Roo appears with young children. Rubs and Ru are less common but real. Since the name is already two easy syllables, many people never shorten it at all.
Does Ruby rhyme with anything useful? +
The ending pairs with a fair number of playground inventions, which means cartoon-based teases are close to guaranteed at some point in primary school. Most bearers report these are affectionate rather than cruel, and they stop by about age eleven.
Is Ruby an old-fashioned name? +
It was, and for a while that made it unusable. The Edwardian generation who carried it had largely died out by the 1990s, which cleared the way. It now reads as vintage rather than dated, and in Britain it has been thoroughly modern for twenty years.