What Is Romanization? A Complete Guide to Writing Systems in Roman Letters

Romanization is everywhere. It appears on passports, road signs, maps, library records, language-learning materials, restaurant menus, academic publications, search engines, and international databases.

The Chinese name 北京 may appear as Běijīng. The Japanese word 東京 becomes Tōkyō. The Korean name 한국 is commonly written Hanguk, while the Russian name Москва may be represented as Moskva.

These are not translations. They are examples of writing words from non-Latin scripts with Roman—or Latin—letters.

The basic idea is simple, but the process can become surprisingly complex. A language may have several competing romanization systems. One system may prioritize pronunciation, another may preserve the original spelling, and a third may remove diacritics so that the result is easier to type.

This guide explains what romanization is, how it works, why different standards produce different results, and how to choose an appropriate system.

Quick Answer: What Is Romanization?

Romanization is the process of converting writing from a non-Roman script into the Roman, or Latin, script.

The United Nations Group of Experts on Geographical Names defines romanization in essentially these terms and develops standards intended to make international geographical names more consistent. Unicode similarly describes transliteration as converting characters from one script into another without translating the underlying words.

Romanization can represent:

• The written characters of the original text
• The pronunciation of a word
• A combination of spelling and pronunciation
• A conventional form already established for a name

The exact result depends on the romanization system being used.

For example:

Original form	Script	Possible romanization
中国	Han characters	Zhōngguó
東京	Japanese mixed script	Tōkyō
한국	Hangul	Hanguk
Москва	Cyrillic	Moskva
كتاب	Arabic	kitāb
भारत	Devanagari	Bhārat

These examples are illustrative. Capitalization, diacritics, word division, pronunciation rules, and letter choices can differ between standards.

Why Is It Called Romanization?

The term comes from the Roman alphabet, another name for the Latin alphabet. The modern Latin script developed from the writing system used by ancient Rome and was later adapted for thousands of languages.

In contemporary usage, Roman script and Latin script usually refer to the same general family of letters. Romanized writing is not limited to the 26 unaccented letters used in English. It may include extended Latin characters such as:

• ā
• č
• ḍ
• ḥ
• ñ
• š
• ū
• ž

The Unicode Standard notes that the Latin script is used to write or transliterate a wide variety of languages. Extended Latin letters and additional marks allow it to represent distinctions that cannot be expressed clearly with basic English letters alone. (Unicode)

In this context, romanization should not be confused with the historical term Romanization, which can also describe the cultural influence of ancient Rome.

Romanization, Transliteration, Transcription, and Translation

These four terms are related, but they do not mean the same thing.

Romanization

Romanization is the broad process of representing a non-Latin writing system with Latin letters. It may be based mainly on written characters, mainly on pronunciation, or on a mixture of both.

Transliteration

Transliteration attempts to map written elements in one script to corresponding written elements in another script.

A strict transliteration system may aim for reversibility. In other words, a reader or computer should be able to reconstruct the original script from the romanized form.

Unicode uses transliteration more broadly for script conversion, while noting that some narrower definitions reserve the term for reversible conversion. A non-reversible, pronunciation-oriented conversion is often called transcription. (Unicode CLDR)

Transcription

Transcription represents how a word is pronounced rather than exactly how it is spelled.

A transcription system may change its output according to:

• Sound changes in connected speech
• The position of a letter
• The language being represented
• Regional pronunciation
• The intended reader

Transcription can make a word easier to pronounce, but it may discard information contained in the original spelling.

Translation

Translation replaces a word or sentence with its meaning in another language.

Unicode illustrates the distinction with the Japanese place name しんばし:

• Romanization: shimbashi in Hepburn
• Alternative romanization: sinbasi in Kunrei
• Literal meaning: new bridge

The first two preserve the Japanese name in Latin letters. The third translates its meaning. (Unicode CLDR)

Comparison Table

Process	Main purpose	Changes the script?	Changes the language?	Usually reversible?
Romanization	Represent non-Latin writing in Latin letters	Yes	No	Sometimes
Transliteration	Represent written characters systematically	Yes	No	Often intended to be
Transcription	Represent pronunciation	Usually	No	Usually not
Translation	Communicate meaning in another language	Not necessarily	Yes	No

Romanization is therefore an umbrella concept. A particular romanization system may be transliteration-based, transcription-based, or hybrid.

Why Do We Need Romanization?

Romanization helps people and systems work with languages whose original scripts they cannot read, display, enter, or search.

International communication

A traveler may not be able to read 서울, Москва, Αθήνα, กรุงเทพฯ, or الرياض. Romanized versions make these names more accessible to users of Latin-script languages.

Romanization is especially important for:

• Road signs
• Railway systems
• Airports
• International shipping
• Maps
• Gazetteers
• Travel documents
• Diplomatic communication

UNGEGN works toward consistent romanization of geographical names so that the same locations can be identified reliably in international maps, databases, and official publications. (UNSD)

Library cataloging

Libraries use romanization to catalog books, authors, titles, and subjects written in non-Latin scripts.

The ALA-LC Romanization Tables are approved jointly by the American Library Association and the Library of Congress. They provide systems for a large range of scripts and languages, including Arabic, Armenian, Chinese, Hebrew, Hindi, Japanese, Korean, Persian, Russian, Thai, Tibetan, and Urdu. (The Library of Congress)

Romanized catalog records help with:

• Alphabetical sorting
• Indexing
• Citation
• Shelving
• Authority control
• Cross-language searching
• Record exchange between institutions

Language learning

Romanization can help beginners recognize sounds before they have mastered a new script.

Japanese learners may initially encounter romaji, Korean learners may use Latin spellings of Hangul, and learners of Mandarin may use Pinyin with tone marks.

Romanization can be useful as a bridge, but it does not replace learning the original writing system. Important distinctions may disappear when words are converted into Latin letters.

Digital search and indexing

Unicode identifies searching, indexing, database use, and technical diagnosis as situations in which transliteration can be useful. A romanized search form can help users locate content even when they cannot type the original script. (Unicode CLDR)

For example, a search system might connect:

• Tokyo with 東京
• Hanguk with 한국
• Moskva with Москва
• Zhongguo with 中国

The quality of those connections depends on whether the system recognizes spelling variants, omitted diacritics, alternative standards, and established English names.

How Romanization Works

Romanization is more than replacing one visible character with another. A reliable conversion normally requires several decisions.

1. Identify the source script

The first step is determining which writing system is being converted.

Examples include:

• Arabic
• Armenian
• Cyrillic
• Devanagari
• Georgian
• Greek
• Hangul
• Han characters
• Hebrew
• Japanese kana
• Khmer
• Thai
• Tibetan

A single language may use more than one script, while the same script may be used by several languages.

Cyrillic, for example, is used for Russian, Ukrainian, Bulgarian, Serbian, Mongolian, and other languages. The same Cyrillic character may not always be handled identically across language-specific systems.

2. Identify the language

Knowing the script is not always enough.

Han characters are used in Chinese and also appear in Japanese. The character sequences must be interpreted according to the language in which they occur.

Japanese is particularly complex because its writing system combines:

• Han characters, known as kanji
• Hiragana
• Katakana
• Latin letters

Unicode classifies Japanese as a mixed system containing a logosyllabary, two syllabaries, and the Latin alphabet. (Unicode)

3. Choose a romanization standard

The converter must know which rules to apply.

Possible standards include:

• A national government system
• An ISO standard
• An ALA-LC library standard
• A UNGEGN geographical-name system
• A BGN/PCGN geographical-name system
• An academic transliteration convention
• A popular pronunciation-oriented system
• A simplified ASCII system

Without naming the system, a romanized spelling may be impossible to evaluate properly.

4. Map letters, syllables, or sounds

Some systems map individual characters. Others map syllables, combinations of characters, or spoken sounds.

A character may become:

• One Latin letter
• A digraph such as sh, kh, or zh
• A trigraph
• A letter with a diacritic
• An apostrophe or modifier symbol
• Nothing at all, if the source mark is ignored

The same source character may also produce different outputs in different contexts.

5. Apply contextual rules

Romanization rules often depend on neighboring letters, word position, or pronunciation.

Korean Revised Romanization, for example, is based on standard Korean pronunciation. Some consonants therefore receive different Latin representations depending on their phonetic environment. The system also aims to avoid non-letter symbols where possible. (Korean Language Portal)

Arabic presents a different challenge. Short vowels are frequently absent from ordinary Arabic writing, so a fully vocalized romanization may require knowledge that is not explicitly visible in the source text.

6. Add pronunciation information

Some systems add information through:

• Tone marks
• Macrons for long vowels
• Dots below consonants
• Carons
• Breves
• Apostrophes
• Hyphens
• Capitalization

Mandarin Pinyin can use tone marks, as in:

• mā
• má
• mǎ
• mà

Unicode describes Pinyin as representing Mandarin syllables through Latin letters that may be modified with tone marks. ISO 7098 establishes principles for the romanization of Modern Chinese Putonghua. (Unicode)

7. Apply word-division and capitalization rules

The original script may not use spaces or capital letters in the same way as Latin-script languages.

A complete romanization system must therefore decide:

• Where words begin and end
• Whether grammatical particles are attached
• How personal names are divided
• Whether compounds use spaces or hyphens
• Which letters are capitalized
• How punctuation is treated

These decisions can create substantial differences even when two systems use similar letter mappings.

How the Source Writing System Affects Romanization

Romanizing an alphabet is not the same as romanizing an abjad, syllabary, abugida, or logosyllabary.

Alphabets

An alphabet contains letters for both consonants and vowels. Greek, Cyrillic, Armenian, Georgian, and Latin are examples of alphabetic scripts.

Alphabet-to-alphabet conversion may appear straightforward, but it can still be complicated by:

• Historical spelling
• Letters representing multiple sounds
• Language-specific pronunciation
• Soft and hard signs
• Stress
• Palatalization
• Letter combinations

ISO 9, for example, establishes a transliteration system for Cyrillic characters used by Slavic and non-Slavic languages. Its design emphasizes systematic character conversion rather than providing an English-style pronunciation guide. (ISO)

Abjads

An abjad is a writing system in which the main letters primarily represent consonants. Arabic and Hebrew are prominent examples.

Vowels may be:

• Omitted
• Marked only in certain texts
• Represented partly by consonant letters
• Added through diacritics

Unicode notes that Arabic and Hebrew are commonly written without full vowel marking. This means that a romanizer may need linguistic knowledge, a dictionary, or contextual analysis to supply vowels that are not shown explicitly. (Unicode)

ISO 233 provides a formal system for transliterating Arabic characters into Latin characters, while ALA-LC maintains its own Arabic table for bibliographic use. These systems may differ from simplified spellings intended for travelers or general readers. (ISO)

Abugidas

In an abugida, consonant letters normally carry an inherent vowel. Other vowel marks modify or replace that vowel.

Devanagari is a well-known example. A basic consonant may imply an a sound unless another vowel sign or a vowel-suppressing mark is present.

Romanization software must recognize:

• Inherent vowels
• Dependent vowels
• Independent vowels
• Consonant clusters
• Viramas or halants
• Conjunct forms
• Marks written above, below, before, or after a consonant

Unicode explains that the visible arrangement of an Indic orthographic syllable may be two-dimensional and may not correspond directly to the order in which characters are encoded. (Unicode)

ISO 15919 provides transliteration tables for Devanagari and several related Indic scripts, including Bengali, Gujarati, Gurmukhi, Kannada, Malayalam, Odia, Sinhala, Tamil, and Telugu. (ISO)

Syllabaries

In a syllabary, each symbol generally represents a syllable or mora rather than an individual consonant or vowel.

Japanese hiragana and katakana are familiar examples. The kana か represents ka, while き represents ki.

However, romanization still requires rules for:

• Long vowels
• Small kana
• Doubled consonants
• Moraic nasal sounds
• Particles
• Sound changes across boundaries

The Japanese sequence しんばし illustrates how two standards can produce different outputs:

• Hepburn: shimbashi
• Kunrei: sinbasi

Both are systematic, but they prioritize different correspondences between Japanese spelling and Latin letters. (Unicode CLDR)

Featural Syllabaries

Korean Hangul is arranged visually into syllable blocks, but each block contains smaller elements representing consonants and vowels.

Unicode describes these components as jamo. A Hangul syllable may contain an initial consonant, a vowel, and an optional final consonant. (Unicode)

A romanizer may process the individual components while producing a form based on the pronunciation of the complete syllable or word.

Logosyllabaries

In a logosyllabary, written units may represent words or morphemes and also carry syllabic readings.

Han characters are the leading modern example. Unicode notes that the same characters are called:

• Hànzì in Chinese
• Kanji in Japanese
• Hanja in Korean

A character cannot always be romanized from its shape alone because its reading depends on the language, word, and context. (Unicode)

For example, the characters 東京 are read Tōkyō in Japanese. The same characters have a different reading in Mandarin Chinese.

This is why character-by-character replacement is insufficient for many Chinese and Japanese texts.

Major Romanization Authorities and Standards

There is no single universal organization that controls every romanization system. Different institutions develop standards for different purposes.

ISO

The International Organization for Standardization publishes several script-conversion standards.

Important examples include:

Standard	Main scope
ISO 9	Cyrillic to Latin
ISO 233	Arabic to Latin
ISO 7098	Modern Chinese romanization
ISO 11940	Thai transliteration
ISO 11940-2	Simplified transcription of Thai
ISO 15919	Devanagari and related Indic scripts

ISO standards often emphasize international information exchange, consistency, and the ability to reconstruct written information. ISO 233 explicitly describes automatic transmission and reconstitution as central aims of stringent conversion. (ISO)

ALA-LC

ALA-LC systems are designed primarily for libraries, bibliographic records, citations, and authority control.

Because catalogers must distinguish names and titles reliably, ALA-LC romanization often preserves details through diacritics and modifier characters. Its output may therefore be more precise but less immediately intuitive for general readers. (The Library of Congress)

UNGEGN

UNGEGN concentrates on geographical names.

Its Working Group on Romanization Systems seeks agreement on one system for each non-Roman writing system used for geographical names. Proposed systems are expected to be scientifically sound and substantially implemented by the proposing country. (UNSD)

The evaluation process considers:

• Linguistic soundness
• Technical clarity
• Consistency
• Avoidance of ambiguity
• One-to-one correspondence where feasible
• Reversibility where appropriate
• Ease of writing
• National implementation
• International usability

These goals can conflict. A perfectly reversible spelling may require numerous diacritics, while a simple spelling may lose distinctions. UNGEGN explicitly recognizes the need to balance these concerns.

BGN/PCGN

BGN/PCGN systems are jointly associated with the United States Board on Geographic Names and the United Kingdom’s Permanent Committee on Geographical Names.

They are commonly used for geographical names and official cartographic work. Systems may be based on national standards, as occurred with the BGN/PCGN agreement for Ukrainian. (Geographic Names Server)

National authorities

Governments and national language institutions may establish romanization rules for:

• Road signs
• Personal names
• Passports
• Place names
• Education
• Official publications
• Public databases

The Republic of Korea’s Revised Romanization, for example, is documented by the National Institute of Korean Language and is based primarily on standard Korean pronunciation. (Korean Language Portal)

Why Are There So Many Romanization Systems?

Multiple systems exist because romanization serves several different goals.

Reversibility

A reversible system preserves enough information to reconstruct the original writing.

This is valuable for:

• Library records
• Archival work
• Academic research
• Data exchange
• Linguistic analysis

Reversibility often requires special characters or diacritics.

Pronounceability

A pronunciation-oriented system tries to help its intended readers say the word.

A spelling designed for English speakers may differ from one designed for French, German, Spanish, or Indonesian speakers. Latin letters do not have identical pronunciations across languages.

Simplicity

Public signs, forms, keyboards, and databases may prefer spellings that use only basic Latin letters.

For example, a simplified system might write:

• Tokyo instead of Tōkyō
• Zhongguo instead of Zhōngguó
• Kitab instead of kitāb

The simplified forms are easier to enter, but they remove distinctions such as tone, vowel length, or consonant quality.

Established usage

Some spellings remain common because they are historically familiar, commercially recognized, or personally preferred.

A name used for decades may not be changed merely because a newer standard would produce a different result.

Different subject areas

A library, passport office, academic journal, mapmaker, news organization, and language textbook may legitimately choose different systems.

A system should therefore be judged according to its stated purpose rather than treated as universally correct or incorrect.

Accuracy, Readability, and Reversibility

Romanization design often involves a three-way trade-off.

Accurate representation

A detailed system may distinguish every important character or sound.

Advantages:

• Preserves linguistic information
• Supports scholarship
• Reduces ambiguity
• May allow reverse conversion

Disadvantages:

• Requires unfamiliar symbols
• Can be difficult to type
• May be difficult for general readers

Easy pronunciation

A reader-oriented system may approximate how the word sounds.

Advantages:

• Useful for travelers and learners
• Easier to read aloud
• Can reflect actual speech

Disadvantages:

• May depend on the reader’s language
• May hide the original spelling
• Is often not reversible

Easy typing

An ASCII-style system uses basic letters, numbers, hyphens, or apostrophes.

Advantages:

• Compatible with simple keyboards
• Convenient for URLs and older databases
• Easy to search and transmit

Disadvantages:

• Can produce ambiguous spellings
• May require long letter combinations
• Can remove tone, stress, or vowel-length information

No single system maximizes all three qualities.

Diacritics: Optional Decoration or Essential Information?

Diacritics are not merely decorative. In many romanization systems, they carry essential distinctions.

They may mark:

• Vowel length: a versus ā
• Tone: ma versus mǎ
• Consonant type: d versus ḍ
• Palatal or postalveolar sounds: s versus š
• Emphasis or pharyngeal quality: h versus ḥ
• Separate source characters that would otherwise look identical

Removing diacritics may make a form easier to type, but it can merge different words or source characters.

UNGEGN encourages reversibility and avoidance of ambiguity while also recommending that special letters, diacritics, digraphs, and trigraphs be limited where practical. This illustrates the fundamental tension between precision and simplicity.

A good reference tool should clearly distinguish between:

1. A fully marked standard form
2. A simplified form without diacritics
3. An informal pronunciation guide

Is Romanization Always Reversible?

No.

A romanization is reversible only when it preserves enough information to identify the original characters unambiguously.

Consider a hypothetical system in which two different source letters are both represented by s. Once the original has been converted, there is no way to determine which letter produced the s without additional context.

Reversibility may also be lost when:

• Vowels are omitted
• Tone marks are removed
• Long and short vowels are merged
• Several consonants share one spelling
• Word boundaries are changed
• Capitalization carries information
• Pronunciation replaces original spelling
• Exceptions are handled inconsistently

Unicode notes that even systems theoretically intended to be reversible may fail in uncommon or insufficiently specified cases. (Unicode CLDR)

For dependable round-trip conversion, the system must define mappings and contextual rules precisely.

Romanizing Personal Names

Personal names require special care because a mechanically generated romanization may not match the form used by the person.

A name may have:

• An official passport spelling
• A traditional family spelling
• A professional stage name
• A spelling based on another language
• An older romanization retained for continuity
• A simplified international form

For identity-related records, an established or officially supplied spelling should generally take priority over an automatically generated form.

A reference site can still show alternative systems, but they should be labeled as calculated variants rather than presented as replacements for a person’s chosen name.

Romanizing Geographical Names

Place names may have several kinds of Latin-script forms:

• Official national romanization
• UN-endorsed romanization
• BGN/PCGN form
• Historical spelling
• English exonym
• Locally preferred Latin spelling

A romanized local form is not necessarily the same as an English-language name.

For example, a location may have a traditional English name that is not a direct romanization of its current local spelling.

UNGEGN treats standardized geographical naming as an international communication problem. Its process begins with national development and implementation, followed by technical review and international endorsement.

Best Practices for Romanization Tools and Databases

A reliable romanization platform should not return an unexplained Latin spelling. It should provide enough context for users to understand the result.

Preserve the original text

Never discard the native-script form after conversion.

The original should remain the primary reference because a romanized output may be incomplete, ambiguous, or based on a different standard from the one the user needs.

Name the system

Label outputs clearly:

• Pinyin
• Revised Romanization
• Hepburn
• Kunrei
• ISO 9
• ISO 15919
• ALA-LC
• BGN/PCGN
• Simplified ASCII

“Romanized result” alone is not sufficiently informative.

Identify the language and script

The same script can serve multiple languages. Conversion rules should therefore specify both where necessary:

• Russian Cyrillic
• Ukrainian Cyrillic
• Persian in Arabic script
• Urdu in Perso-Arabic script
• Mandarin Chinese in Han characters
• Japanese kanji and kana

Separate formal romanization from pronunciation help

A formal result and an English pronunciation guide serve different purposes.

For example:

• Formal romanization: Tōkyō
• Simplified spelling: Tokyo
• Pronunciation guidance: approximately toh-kyoh

These should not be presented as interchangeable outputs.

Preserve diacritics by default

Where a standard requires diacritics, the complete form should be shown first. An ASCII version can be offered separately.

Show alternative standards side by side

When several systems are widely used, comparison is more useful than presenting one form as universally correct.

Source	System A	System B
しんばし	shimbashi	sinbasi
Example purpose	Reader-oriented	More structurally regular

Record the standard version

Standards can be revised. Databases should record which edition or rule set generated an output.

Support search variants

A search system may need to recognize:

• Diacritic and non-diacritic forms
• Joined and separated words
• Historical spellings
• Alternative standards
• Native-script forms
• Common conventional names

Unicode specifically identifies cross-script searching and indexing as important applications of transliteration. (Unicode CLDR)

Common Misconceptions About Romanization

Romanization translates the meaning

It does not. Romanization changes the script while normally preserving the original word or name.

Every word has one correct romanization

Many words have several valid forms because different systems follow different rules.

Romanized spelling shows exact pronunciation

Not necessarily. Some systems represent spelling rather than speech. Others are designed for readers whose Latin-letter pronunciation conventions may differ from yours.

Diacritics can always be removed safely

Removing them may erase tone, vowel length, consonant distinctions, or reversibility.

Romanization can be performed without knowing the language

Sometimes a script can be transliterated mechanically. In many other cases—particularly with unmarked vowels, context-dependent readings, or logographic characters—the language must be identified.

A romanized name should replace the native-script name

Romanization is an additional representation, not inherently a superior or more authentic one.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is romanization the same as transliteration?

Not exactly. Romanization is conversion specifically into Latin script. Transliteration can occur between any two scripts. In addition, romanization may include pronunciation-based transcription rather than strict character-by-character transliteration.

Is Pinyin a romanization system?

Yes. Hanyu Pinyin is a system for representing Mandarin Chinese with Latin letters. ISO 7098 describes principles for the romanization of Modern Chinese Putonghua. (ISO)

Is romaji a language?

No. Rōmaji means Roman letters used to represent Japanese. It is a way of writing Japanese, not a separate language.

Is IPA a romanization system?

The International Phonetic Alphabet uses an extended form of the Latin script, but it is primarily a phonetic notation system for representing speech sounds. It is not normally treated as a language-specific romanization standard. Unicode distinguishes phonetic alphabets from ordinary general-purpose writing systems. (Unicode)

Why do Japanese words have different romanized spellings?

Systems such as Hepburn and Kunrei apply different conventions. Hepburn generally favors forms familiar to readers of English-like Latin spelling, while Kunrei follows a more regular relationship with Japanese phonological patterns.

Why are Korean consonants sometimes written differently?

Revised Romanization is based substantially on standard Korean pronunciation, so the Latin representation of certain consonants can change according to their position and phonetic environment. (Korean Language Portal)

Are tone marks required in Chinese romanization?

They are part of fully marked Pinyin when tones need to be represented, but they are often omitted in names, signs, URLs, and informal text. Removing them makes typing easier but can create ambiguity.

Can Arabic be romanized automatically?

Character conversion can be automated, but complete pronunciation-oriented output may require additional information because ordinary Arabic text often omits short-vowel marks. (Unicode)

Which romanization system is best?

The best system depends on the purpose.

Use:

• A reversible standard for archives and scholarly data
• An official national system for government information
• ALA-LC for relevant library cataloging
• UNGEGN or BGN/PCGN for applicable geographical names
• A pronunciation-oriented system for language learners
• An ASCII version for technical environments that cannot support diacritics

Conclusion

Romanization is the representation of non-Latin writing in Roman or Latin letters. It makes names and texts more accessible across languages, scripts, countries, and technical systems.

However, romanization is not a neutral act of replacing symbols. Every system makes choices about what information to preserve:

• Original spelling
• Pronunciation
• Tone
• Vowel length
• Character identity
• Word boundaries
• Typing simplicity
• Reader familiarity
• Reversibility

That is why the same word may have several legitimate romanized forms.

A trustworthy romanization reference should always preserve the original script, identify the language, name the conversion standard, retain meaningful diacritics, explain alternative forms, and distinguish formal romanization from translation and pronunciation guidance.

Romanization is most useful not when it hides the original writing system, but when it creates a clear and traceable bridge between scripts.