How do Ruby symbols work?

Question

I read that Ruby has a language featured called "labels", how does that work?

Update:

I saw it at http://ruby.about.com/od/gems/qt/shorturl.htm where the author talks about a label at the bottom of the article with:

puts ShortURL.shorten('http://ruby.about.com', :lns)

Answer 1

Think the author meant to say symbols. You can read about them here, and the docs

Answer 2

I've just consulted my "Pickaxe" book and there's no such feature. Could it go by another name?

Answer 3

The Rails framework has labels but these are just helpers for the HTML label tag.