Ruby in Chinese: 如碧

Ruby is written 如碧 in Mandarin (rú bì) — one character for the surname 如 and one for the given name. The characters are chosen to carry the sound and the sense of Ruby rather than to transliterate it letter by letter, which is how Chinese names are actually made. On this page the seal is carved in the Zhongshan King (中山王) bronze-inscription seal script, with the Academia Sinica Chongxi Small Seal (崇羲篆體) filling any character the main font lacks.

如碧 breaks down as 如 (rú) — As, like — to accord with; 碧 (bì) — Jade-green blue — the color of deep water and distant mountains. The seal note we would put under it: A gemstone rendered as the color of distant mountains.

Pinyin: rú bì — 如 is tone 2 (a rising pitch, like the start of a question); 碧 is tone 4 (a sharp fall, like a full stop). Mandarin has four tones plus a neutral tone, and getting them wrong is the most common mistake Western speakers make with Chinese names — the seal itself is unaffected, since the carving is of the written form.

Yes. 如 (rú) is one of the recorded Chinese surnames. The word for following: the oracle bone woman (女) holding the mouth of obedience — to go along, to be as. 如 became the hinge of Chinese — if, like, as — and in names on this site it stands for the Ru-, Lu- sounds of Western names, China’s way of writing "as if" for foreign. The full account, with the character’s own etymology, is on the 如 surname page — and that lineage is the reason a Western name can borrow the character for a surname at all.

Because names in Chinese are chosen, not inherited by sound. 碧 (bì) reads jade-green blue — the color of deep water and distant mountains — and its own history runs: From 石 and 王, white and jade: a green stone. It is the word for the mineral, and by extension for the particular blue-green of deep water and the colour of a distant mountain — the colour you see when the mountain is further away than the weather.

如碧 is built from 如 and 碧 — 如 (rú), 碧 (bì) — and no other curated name on this site shares that combination, because each entry is built around its own sound and its own meaning rather than recycled syllables. Names that start the same way as Ruby are linked at the foot of this page.

Latin rubens — "red." First the gemstone, then the color word, then a Gilded-Age name of the wild American West: a saloon singer, a prospector's vein — and now, once again, everybody's daughter. The full account — the etymology, the bearers, and why this site renders it as 如碧 — is in the section above.