Gruff

Gruff is primarily encountered as a personal name. In Welsh usage, Gruff is often a shortened form of Gruffydd, a traditional given name borne by several medieval Welsh rulers. The form Gruff also appears today as a standalone given name or nickname in Wales and other regions.

Notable people with the name Gruff include Gruff Rhys, a Welsh musician who fronted the band Super Furry Animals. The name appears in various contemporary contexts as a first name rather than a surname, reflecting its Welsh origins.

In computing, Gruff is a graphing library for the Ruby programming language. Gruff provides a simple interface for generating charts and graphs and is commonly used to create visualizations such as line and bar charts. The library relies on the Ruby ecosystem and works with image generation backends to produce chart outputs suitable for inclusion in applications and reports.

The term Gruff is visually similar to the English adjective gruff, which means rough or brusque in manner or voice. While the two terms share spelling, they belong to different linguistic domains: Gruff as a given name or proper noun, and gruff as a common English word describing demeanor or sound.