Ozhegov's 125th Birthday: A Dictionary Born in the Fire of War Captured Millions of Hearts

 "The vocabulary of everyday speech... is a constant source of replenishment of normalized speech" (S.I. Ozhegov)

September 22 marks the 125th anniversary of the birth of Sergei Ivanovich Ozhegov (1900-1964), author of the popular "Dictionary of the Russian Language" and the main compiler of the first Soviet "Explanatory Dictionary" (1935-1940) (from Pushkin to Gorky), edited by Dmitry Nikolaevich Ushakov (1873-1942).

An electronic copy of the first volume of the Ushakov Dictionary is available at the Boris Yeltsin Presidential Library.

S.I. Ozhegov developed a plan for publishing a mass-market, one-volume popular dictionary while still working on the "Explanatory Dictionary." The writing team was to include six linguists under the supervision of D.N. Ushakov. However, Sergei Ivanovich did the bulk of the work on the dictionary; he alone did not evacuate and remained in frontline Moscow. The RUDN University library holds two copies of the first edition of the Dictionary (1949).

The collection also contains all other lifetime editions of the Dictionary: 1952, 1953, 1960, 1963, and 1964, which were published in millions of copies. Many later publications of the Dictionary (1970-1999) were edited by Natalia Yulievna Shvedova (1916-2009). Starting with the 24th edition (2003), N. Yu. Shvedova's later additions were removed from the Dictionary, and Lev Ivanovich Skvortsov (1934-2014) became the title editor and author of the additions.

From 1966 to 1988, Lev Ivanovich, continuing the ideas of the outstanding lexicographer, headed the Russian Speech Culture Sector, founded by S.I. Ozhegov at the Institute of Russian Language of the USSR Academy of Sciences (1952). The scientific library still holds the manual "Lexicology. Lexicography. Culture of Speech" (1974), which contains S.I. Ozhegov's most important works, previously inaccessible, collected and prepared for publication by L.I. Skvortsov.