The Russian Contributions to the English Language: a Case of OED Record

The paper looks at Russian contributions to the English language, which are in evidence of the Third Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary (OED3). With the number of 402 loanwords the Russian language figures among the twenty-five most prolific language sources of word-borrowing in the vocabulary of modern English (Durkin, 2014). This survey is an attempt to produce a far fuller language profile of Russian investigating OED's data further. In addition to the loanwords, it also looks at those lexical items in OED3, which appeared in English under the lexical influence of the Russian language namely, loan translations or calques, semantic borrowing, proper names of Russian origin and their derivatives. By performing a number of advanced searches on OED Online, additional subsets of aussianisms' were generated and carefully examined. The paper concludes that the total number of the Russian contributions to the English language exceeds 1000 lexical items and the input of the Russian language to the lexicon of modern English should be assessed as more prolific.