# Gem-naming culture

> Ruby libraries are called gems, and Rubyists love giving them punny, whimsical names.

Ruby's reusable libraries are called **gems** (they ship through a tool called RubyGems), and naming one is half the fun: the community has a long, delightful habit of choosing puns, jokes, and playful tributes over dry, descriptive names. Two favorites show the range. **Nokogiri**, the popular HTML and XML parser, is named after the Japanese word *nokogiri* (鋸), a kind of saw: you have a dense forest of nested tags, so you reach for a saw to cut through it. It was co-created by [Aaron Patterson ("tenderlove")](https://chunkybacon.dev/people/tenderlove.md), who is known for exactly this sort of wordplay. **Sinatra**, the minimal web framework, is named after the singer Frank Sinatra, and its own AUTHORS file thanks "Frank Sinatra (chairman of the board) for having so much class he deserves a web-framework named after him". Once you start noticing the pattern, the whole ecosystem reads a little more like a joke book, and that is very much on purpose.

*Related:* [Aaron Patterson ("tenderlove")](https://chunkybacon.dev/people/tenderlove.md) · [Chunky bacon](https://chunkybacon.dev/glossary/chunky-bacon.md)

## Sources
- Nokogiri (official site, shows the 鋸 kanji): https://nokogiri.org/
- Japanese saw (Wikipedia, "nokogiri" = saw): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_saw
- Sinatra AUTHORS.md ("so much class" line): https://github.com/sinatra/sinatra/blob/main/AUTHORS.md

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Source: https://chunkybacon.dev/glossary/gem-naming-culture/
License: CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)