40 Fun Facts About Russian Alphabet

The Soviet Union's Russian initials СССР, often misread as 'CCCP', spell out which Latin letters, letter for letter?

SSSR is the letter-for-letter reading, short for Soyuz Sovetskikh Sotsialisticheskikh Respublik. The Russian С is an S and Р is a rolled R, so nothing in the famous initials sounds like 'CCCP'.

Which classic video game often styled its name with a backwards-looking R, really the Russian letter that says 'ya'?

Tetris was written TETЯIS on many Western versions to play up its Russian origins. Read as real Russian, that logo would come out as something like 'tetyais'.

Because Russian has no 'h' sound, the English name Harry is traditionally spelled just like which other name?

Garry is the result: Russian traditionally swaps a foreign 'h' for its hard 'g' letter, so a hamburger becomes a 'gamburger' and the composer Haydn becomes 'Gaydn'.

Which soup's Russian name ends in the single letter Щ, written 'shch' when spelled out in English letters?

Borscht has only four letters in Russian, and the last of them is romanised 'shch'. The English spelling with a final 't' arrived by way of Yiddish.

The Russian letter Я, the very last of the alphabet, is also a complete one-letter word with which meaning?

I is all it means: я is the Russian first-person pronoun, a whole word in a single letter. Its shape looks like a Latin R turned backwards, but the sound is 'ya'.

Which Russian letter makes the 'v' sound at the start of the word vodka?

В is the letter, and it fools beginners because its capital looks exactly like a Latin B. The real 'b' sound belongs to a different letter altogether.

How many letters, ten of them vowels, make up the modern Russian alphabet?

33 letters make up the alphabet, seven more than English uses. Two of them are silent signs that have no sound of their own and only change the letters around them.

Which Russian ruler's 'civil script' of 1708 gave printed letters their modern, Western-looking shapes?

Peter the Great had toured Western Europe on his Grand Embassy a decade earlier, and his new letterforms moved closer to the Latin alphabet. He also swapped the old letter-numerals for Arabic digits.

Which Asian country outside the Soviet Union adopted the Russian alphabet in the 1940s, adding just two extra letters?

Mongolia introduced the alphabet in 1941 under strong Soviet influence, taking every Russian letter and adding Ө and Ү for vowels that Russian lacks.

Which Russian letter makes the first sound of nyet, the blunt everyday word for 'no'?

Н is the letter, a perfect double of the Latin capital H that actually says 'n'. It trips up beginners because the alphabet has no true 'h' letter at all.

Saint Cyril, whose name the Russian script carries, devised the first Slavic alphabet with which brother?

Methodius and his younger brother Cyril were Byzantine missionaries, remembered together as the 'Apostles to the Slavs' for their work in the ninth century.

Which comedy film's title swapped its letter A for the Russian letter Д, which really makes a 'd' sound?

Borat was styled BORДT on its posters, so a Russian reader sees a 'd' where the A should be. Borrowing lookalike Russian letters for effect is known as faux Cyrillic.

Which Russian letter stands for the single 'ts' sound that opens the word tsar?

Ц packs the two sounds of 'ts' into one letter, like the end of the English word 'cats'. It is thought to descend from the Hebrew letter tsadi or a related Arabic letter.

Which Russian letter makes the buzzing 'zh' sound in the title of the novel Doctor Zhivago?

Ж has no lookalike in the Greek or Latin alphabets. Some scholars argue that its shape pictures a beetle, because the Slavic word for beetle begins with the same sound.

Which single Russian letter begins the surnames of both the playwright Chekhov and the composer Tchaikovsky?

Ч makes the 'ch' of 'choice' and resembles an upside-down h or the digit 4. Stricter transliteration systems drop the English T and spell the composer Chaykovskiy.

Which sound does the Russian letter И, which looks like a backwards Latin N, actually make?

Ee as in see is the answer: И is a vowel, the 'i' of 'machine'. Standing on its own, the same letter is also the Russian word for 'and'.

Which sound does the Russian letter Х, borrowed from the Greek chi, make despite looking like a Latin X?

Kh as in loch is the sound, a breathy rasp made at the back of the mouth. English spellings usually write it 'kh', as in the first name Mikhail.

Which Greek letter is the direct ancestor of the Russian letter П and still shares its 'p' sound?

Pi was copied almost unchanged: a capital П looks exactly like a Greek capital Π. Many other Russian letters were adapted from Greek ones in the same way.

Which Russian letter makes the 'sh' sound in the middle of both babushka and the poet Pushkin's surname?

Ш stands for the 'sh' of 'shoe'. Its three-pronged shape was probably borrowed from the Hebrew letter shin, which makes the same sound.

Which Russian letter, which makes the 'f' sound, appears almost only in words borrowed from other languages?

Ф came from the Greek letter phi, and the Slavic languages have almost no native words with an 'f' sound. It mostly spells imports such as кофе, the Russian word for coffee.

Which Russian letter, often printed without its two dots, hides in the surname English spells as Gorbachev?

Yo, written Ё, is so often printed as a plain Е that the English-speaking world learned the Soviet leader's name as Gorbachev. Khrushchev's surname hides the same letter.

Which Russian letter, added to the end of brat ('brother'), turns it into the verb meaning 'to take'?

Ь is the soft sign: it has no sound of its own but tells the reader to soften the consonant before it. Russian relies on that small difference to tell many pairs of words apart.

Which Russian newspaper is nicknamed 'Ъ' for the old-style hard sign it keeps at the end of its name?

Kommersant keeps the letter in tribute to a paper founded under that name in 1909. Until the 1918 reform, a silent hard sign closed every word that ended in a hard consonant.

Which Russian vowel, a sound English lacks, begins virtually no native Russian words?

Ы opens almost nothing in native Russian beyond a verb meaning 'to say the Ы sound'. It does begin some foreign names, including the Un of North Korea's Kim Jong-un.

Which Russian letter, known as 'short I', makes the 'y' sound that ends the surname Tolstoy?

Й is built from another letter with a small curved mark called a breve on top, but Russian treats it as a separate letter with its own place in the alphabet.

Which older script, devised in the 860s for a mission to the Slavs of Moravia, did Cyrillic largely displace?

Glagolitic is the alphabet credited to Saint Cyril himself, so the script that carries his name is probably not the one he invented. His followers are thought to have created Cyrillic later.

In which medieval state, home of the Preslav Literary School, was the script now used for Russian first developed?

Bulgaria was where followers of Saint Cyril probably created the script in the ninth century, under Tsar Simeon the Great, by adapting Greek letters to Slavic sounds.

Which party, weeks after seizing power in 1917, decreed the reform that cut several letters from the Russian alphabet?

Bolsheviks pushed through a reform that scholars had drafted before the revolution. In some printing shops the abolished letters were physically removed from the type cases.

Which Slavic language still writes the dotted letter І that the Russian alphabet dropped in 1918?

Ukrainian kept І as an everyday vowel. Russian spelling before the reform used it ahead of other vowels, and to tell the word for 'world' apart from its soundalike, the word for 'peace'.

Which abolished Russian letter, written ѣ, became the chief symbol of the old spelling after the 1918 reform?

Yat had come to sound just like the ordinary letter Е, so schoolchildren had to learn by rote which words took it. Russian émigrés kept writing it for decades after the reform.

Which old Russian word for 'alphabet' is formed, like the English word, from the names of its first two letters?

Azbuka joins az and buki, the old names of the first two letters, exactly as 'alphabet' joins the Greek alpha and beta. It is the more traditional of the two words Russian has for its alphabet.

On which material did Onfim, a boy in thirteenth-century Novgorod, scratch his surviving alphabet exercises and doodles?

Birch bark was the scrap paper of medieval Novgorod, soft enough to scratch and preserved by the city's clay soil. Onfim, aged about six or seven, mixed his letters with drawings of battles.

Which Russian historian and writer is traditionally credited with introducing the letter Ё in a poem of the 1790s?

Nikolay Karamzin used Ё in a 1797 poem so that the Russian word for 'tears' would rhyme with the word for 'roses'. Schools were not ordered to use the letter until the 1940s.

Which six letters, Russia's answer to QWERTY, give the main Russian keyboard layout its name?

ЙЦУКЕН, written JCUKEN in Latin letters, replaced an older layout in 1953. Alternative 'phonetic' layouts instead pair each Russian letter with a similar-sounding Latin key.

Which vowel is the most frequently used letter in written Russian, making up about one letter in every nine?

О tops the count at about 11 percent of all letters in a large sample of Russian text. English has a similar champion in the letter e, at roughly 13 percent.

In Russian cursive and italics, the lowercase letter т is written in a shape resembling which Latin letter?

M is the lookalike: a handwritten or italic lowercase т has three downstrokes, just like a Latin m. A cursive п, meanwhile, can easily pass for a Latin n.

Which mark do Russian dictionaries and learners' textbooks print above a vowel to show where the stress falls?

Acute accent is the only true diacritic in Russian writing, and everyday print almost always leaves it out. Native readers are simply expected to know where the stress goes in each word.

The Russian spelling замок means 'lock' or, with the stress shifted to the first syllable, which building?

Castle is stressed on the first syllable and lock on the second. Russian print normally leaves stress unmarked, so readers rely on context to tell such twins apart.

Which printer, forced out of Moscow for his 'blasphemous' new craft, published a Slavic alphabet primer in Lviv in 1574?

Ivan Fyodorov fled after Moscow's scribes turned on the press that threatened their trade, finding refuge in Poland-Lithuania. He is remembered as one of the fathers of East Slavic printing.

Which Greek letter, a triangle in its capital form, is the ancestor of the Russian letter Д?

Delta gave the Russian letter its sound as well as its outline. The little feet at the bottom were borrowed from a Byzantine way of writing the Greek capital.