Ruby

Meaning & origin

Ruby is the hundred-year rule made visible. Its American peak came in 1911, at the height of the Victorian-Edwardian jewel-name fashion; it faded for two generations; and since 1985 it has been climbing back, a genuine 1910s revival now four decades in the making. By 2025 it ranked 64th, given to about one in every 452 girls, popular, but with room left before it re-approaches its ancestors' heights.

The revival runs strongest in Vermont, Wyoming, and Rhode Island, small states, New England prominent among them, which has been the leading edge of the antique-name comeback generally. Ruby fits the pattern exactly: like Hazel and Pearl it offers a great-grandmother's name with color and texture, warmer than the ornate Victorian names and sturdier than the trend names around it.

It also carries unusually good company: Ruby Bridges walking into William Frantz Elementary in 1960 is one of the indelible images of American courage, and Ruby Dee spans stage, screen, and the civil rights movement. A red gem, a July birthstone, a heroine or two, Ruby's case is short and convincing, which is exactly why the comeback keeps going.

Ruby names the red gemstone, whose word came into English through Old French rubi from medieval Latin rubinus, ultimately from Latin rubeus, "red." It joined the given-name stock during the Victorian jewel-name vogue that also produced Pearl and Opal, and in America it climbed through the late nineteenth century to a peak in 1911. The name then spent the mid-twentieth century slowly receding, surviving in songs like "Ruby Tuesday" and bearers like actress Ruby Dee and civil-rights icon Ruby Bridges, before the vintage revival that began in the 1980s and 1990s restored it. Ruby is the birthstone of July, a fact many families fold into the choice.