Basic Russian Dictionary: a Corpora-Based Learner's Dictionary of Russian

The paper presents a project of a learner's dictionary of Russian based on the most frequent Russian lexicon, and the most common words are also used for definitions. Both frequencies and examples are defined using the Russian National Corpus. The corpora methods make possible to include into the dictionary some meanings, constructions absent from the existing dictionaries of Russian let alone learner's dictionaries. Some elements of thesaurus are used in the dictionary. The structure of metalanguage, the study of collocations, and the use of corpora are discussed and exemplified in the paper.