Where to check the correct spelling of Russian words?
How does one correctly transliterate the word ‘powerbank’ into Russian? Should both words in ‘Warsaw Pact’ be capitalized in Russian? The online dictionary of the Russian Academy of Sciences provides answers to these and many similar questions.
In August 2025, the public was stirred by the news that 657 new words had been added to the orthographic dictionary of the Russian language. Among them were many neologisms, borrowings and youth Gen Z slang, such as ‘тиктокер’ (‘TikToker’) and ‘тиктокерша’ (female ‘TikToker’), ‘смузи’ (‘smoothie’) and many others.
This concerns the online resource ‘Akademos’, which is the electronic orthographic dictionary of the V. V. Vinogradov Institute of the Russian Language of the Russian Academy of Sciences. It currently contains over 200,000 entries.
If you need to check the spelling of any word in the Russian language or where to put the stress, this is the website to go to. You can find almost everything on it: standard vocabulary, geographical terms, neologisms, colloquialisms, jargons, slang and a wide variety of highly specialized terms, including political ones.
For example, according to the rules of the Russian language, ‘Варшавский договор’ (‘Warsaw Pact’) must be written exactly like this, with the first word capitalized and the second starting with a lowercase letter.
“This is an online dictionary that monitors how the Russian language is changing and is regularly updated with new additions,” says Vladimir Pakhomov, Scientific Secretary of the Orthographic Commission of the Russian Academy of Sciences.
For instance, the word ‘пауэрба́нк’ (‘powerbank’) has been in common use in Russian for a long time, but its spelling was never officially agreed upon. One could see ‘пауэрбэнк’, ‘повербанк’ and other variations.
“When a word is included in 'Akademos', it signifies that the word has entered the Russian language officially. Moreover, the dictionary's main task is to answer the question of how to spell a word correctly,” Pakhomov says.
