Really, the Russian word is written in the Cyrillic alphabet:
рубль.
Ruble and
rouble are two efforts at transliterating it into our alphabet. Dictionaries published in England (and Australia) generally have the primary entry under
rouble, with
ruble as an alternate form, while dictionaries published in the US seem normally to do it the other way around. The Wikipedia says:
Both the spellings "ruble" and "rouble" are used in English. The form "rouble" is preferred by the Oxford English Dictionary, but the earliest use recorded in English is the now completely obsolete "robble". The form "rouble" probably derives from the transliteration into French used among the Tsarist aristocracy. There is some tendency for North American authors to use "ruble" and other English speakers to use "rouble", and also some tendency for older sources to use "rouble" and more recent ones to use "ruble", but neither tendency is absolute. An accurate, but ungainly, English transliteration is rubl'.
Judging by the number of entries returned by Google searches, the two spelling are used with similar frequency in English language Web pages. (If the search is not restricted to the English language,
rouble gets quite a lot more hits - presumably because of pages in French and other European languages.)
When words have different "American" and "British" spellings, they probably should be treated the same for Chihuahua purposes - both common, or both rare. That didn't happen here, probably because I didn't look at the two words at the same time.
So now you have your explanation, Threeb. Any suggestions as to what I should do about it?
