Russian Alphabet
0Loading crowd target
0Loading crowd target
6correct to beat the crowd
40 free Russian Alphabet trivia questions with answers — trivia quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
The Russian alphabet looks harder than it is. A handful of its letters are old friends from English, a handful are false friends that look familiar but say something else, and the rest are new shapes that each stand for one clear sound. Learn those three groups and you can sound out a street sign, a menu or a football shirt in an afternoon. This quiz mixes letter recognition with the stories behind the script. Some questions give you a sound from a word you already know and ask which letter makes it; others show you a letter and ask what it says. Along the way you will meet the saints, rulers and revolutionaries who shaped the alphabet, the letters that were thrown out, and the Russian letters that turn up in Western logos and film posters. It is written for beginners learning to read Cyrillic, students revising before a test, travellers, and anyone who likes a language puzzle. Every answer comes with a short explanation, and the full set can be played online or printed for a class.
30 of 40 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01The Soviet Union's Russian initials СССР, often misread as 'CCCP', spell out which Latin letters, letter for letter?
SSSR
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'.
Q 02Which classic video game often styled its name with a backwards-looking R, really the Russian letter that says 'ya'?
Tetris
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'.
Q 03Because Russian has no 'h' sound, the English name Harry is traditionally spelled just like which other name?
Garry
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'.
Q 04Which soup's Russian name ends in the single letter Щ, written 'shch' when spelled out in English letters?
Borscht
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.
Q 05The Russian letter Я, the very last of the alphabet, is also a complete one-letter word with which meaning?
I
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'.
Q 06Which Russian letter makes the 'v' sound at the start of the word vodka?
В
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.
Q 07How many letters, ten of them vowels, make up the modern Russian alphabet?
33
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.
Q 08Which Russian ruler's 'civil script' of 1708 gave printed letters their modern, Western-looking shapes?
Peter the Great
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.
Q 09Which Asian country outside the Soviet Union adopted the Russian alphabet in the 1940s, adding just two extra letters?
Mongolia
Mongolia introduced the alphabet in 1941 under strong Soviet influence, taking every Russian letter and adding Ө and Ү for vowels that Russian lacks.
Q 10Which Russian letter makes the first sound of nyet, the blunt everyday word for 'no'?
Н
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.
Q 11Saint Cyril, whose name the Russian script carries, devised the first Slavic alphabet with which brother?
Methodius
Methodius and his younger brother Cyril were Byzantine missionaries, remembered together as the 'Apostles to the Slavs' for their work in the ninth century.
Q 12Which comedy film's title swapped its letter A for the Russian letter Д, which really makes a 'd' sound?
Borat
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.
Q 13Which Russian letter stands for the single 'ts' sound that opens the word tsar?
Ц
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.
Q 21Which Russian letter, often printed without its two dots, hides in the surname English spells as Gorbachev?
Yo
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.
Q 22Which Russian letter, added to the end of brat ('brother'), turns it into the verb meaning 'to take'?
Ь
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.
Q 23Which Russian newspaper is nicknamed 'Ъ' for the old-style hard sign it keeps at the end of its name?
Kommersant
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.
Q 14Which Russian letter makes the buzzing 'zh' sound in the title of the novel Doctor Zhivago?
Ж
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.
Q 15Which single Russian letter begins the surnames of both the playwright Chekhov and the composer Tchaikovsky?
Ч
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.
Q 16Which sound does the Russian letter И, which looks like a backwards Latin N, actually make?
Ee as in see
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'.
Q 17Which sound does the Russian letter Х, borrowed from the Greek chi, make despite looking like a Latin X?
Kh as in loch
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.
Q 18Which Greek letter is the direct ancestor of the Russian letter П and still shares its 'p' sound?
Pi
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.
Q 19Which Russian letter makes the 'sh' sound in the middle of both babushka and the poet Pushkin's surname?
Ш
Ш stands for the 'sh' of 'shoe'. Its three-pronged shape was probably borrowed from the Hebrew letter shin, which makes the same sound.
Q 20Which Russian letter, which makes the 'f' sound, appears almost only in words borrowed from other languages?
Ф
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.
Q 24Which Russian vowel, a sound English lacks, begins virtually no native Russian words?
Ы
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.
Q 25Which Russian letter, known as 'short I', makes the 'y' sound that ends the surname Tolstoy?
Й
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.
Q 26Which older script, devised in the 860s for a mission to the Slavs of Moravia, did Cyrillic largely displace?
Glagolitic
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.
Q 27In which medieval state, home of the Preslav Literary School, was the script now used for Russian first developed?
Bulgaria
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.
Q 28Which party, weeks after seizing power in 1917, decreed the reform that cut several letters from the Russian alphabet?
Bolsheviks
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.
Q 29Which Slavic language still writes the dotted letter І that the Russian alphabet dropped in 1918?
Ukrainian
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'.
Q 30Which abolished Russian letter, written ѣ, became the chief symbol of the old spelling after the 1918 reform?
Yat
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.