Ruut is a Dutch surname which is not very common. It is pronounced the same way as 'Ruud' which is the short Dutch equivalent to Rudolph. In my case its is just 'Ruut' with no derivational abbreviation involved. Usually, the name is used for males, but I have met a female 'Ruut' as well. In the pre Google days of the web my curiosity had me surfing around for instances of 'Ruut' elsewhere and as far as I can recollect, the only instance I came across at those times was the computer club Ruut of the Lappeeranta University of Technology in Finland.

In the Netherlands you may now find a number of Ruuts that are more or less known to the general public. E.g.

	Ruut Veenhoven, a sociology professor at Erasmus University in Rotterdam, also director of the World Database of Happiness.
	Ruut Weisman, a theatre director
	Ruut van der Beele, filmmaker and director. He is the one that snatched the domain www.ruut.nl.
	Ruut van Hooft, clown and actor.

For some reason or other there seems to be an artistic connection. To my surprise, recently this has become increasingly true. Pondering the question 'who is Ruut', I found the answer to come from the young Los Angeles singer/songwriter from Finnish descent ...