Ruby Text Above The Characters

The ruby element prints a small pronunciation gloss riding directly above each base character.

In 2026: Still works in every current browser. ruby wraps the base text and rt holds the annotation, which the browser sets in small type above the base (furigana over kanji, pinyin over hanzi). Microsoft shipped it in Internet Explorer 5 before it was a standard. It is one of the few 1990s vendor markup features that reached the modern spec almost unchanged.

Where it came from: Microsoft added ruby in Internet Explorer 5 (1999). The W3C published Ruby Annotation as a Recommendation in 2001, and HTML5 adopted the element. MDN ↗

<p style="font-size:2.4em; line-height:2.6">
  <ruby>漢<rt>kan</rt>字<rt>ji</rt></ruby>
  and
  <ruby>東京<rt>tokyo</rt></ruby>
</p>