News
7th August 2026
260,000 ambiguous sentence links resolved
In our ~360,000 example sentences, every word links to its dictionary entry. Around 260,000 of those links were missing because the form was ambiguous: запа́л is a fuse but also the past tense of запа́сть ("to fall for someone"), его́ is "his" but also a form of он, and at the start of a sentence Том could be Tom or a volume of a book. Grammar rules alone can't decide these - the rest of the sentence does.
So we had AI models read every ambiguous sentence: two of them judge each case independently, a stronger third settles their disagreements, and a word only gets linked when two agree. Том запа́л на Мэри now links запа́л to запа́сть, while Взорва́лся запа́л links to the fuse. In про́шлой но́чью, но́чью links to the noun ночь; in я рабо́таю но́чью, to the adverb. This also finally sorted the sentences of надо ("must") and its lookalike, the надо-variant of над ("above"): надо мной now points to над.
About 19,000 links remain open - mostly names and words that aren't in the dictionary at all, plus a few hundred where the models honestly couldn't tell. Those stay unlinked rather than guessed.
6th August 2026
в and во: word variants
The preposition в ("in") is written во before certain consonant clusters, for example во сне, во всём. This occurs across a small, closed set of function words: к/ко (ко мне), с/со (со мной), о/об/обо (обо мне), из/изо (изо всех сил), бы/б (я б) and a few others, 13 total.
We used to list each of these spellings as its own dictionary entry. So во had a separate, near-empty page while в had all the meanings, the examples and the audio. Now the pages are combined with a short note on when it's used.
One case was a bit tricky: надо is the о-variant of над ("above"), as in надо мной - but надо is also a separate, common word meaning "must" (надо рабо́тать). Merging it into над would have been wrong, so we kept them separate and let our new, smart sentence linker run again to assignt the sentences correctly between the two.
28th July 2026
You can change the site background without an account now (we remember it in a cookie), and there are new backgrounds to choose from.
20th July 2026
Paddle subscribers can upgrade to a lifetime Dict+ from their profile - it cancels the running subscription automatically.
9th July 2026
The home page now features Categories and Scenarios as image cards.
9th July 2026
Word pages now show the word family and verb-prefix group - the root-related relatives, laid out as a tree.
8th July 2026
You can now set the text size, with five levels and an A− / A+ stepper, in the settings and your profile.
8th July 2026
Rolled out a site-wide redesign - a new look for the header, search, home, sentences, word pages, categories and grammar, with restyled declension and conjugation tables.
30th June 2026
New speaking exercises: say the word or sentence out loud and we check your pronunciation.
27th June 2026
New: Word families
We had it on our list for a long time to show for each word its "root-related words". For example from the root пис ("write") come писа́ть (to write), писа́тель (writer), запи́ска (a note), по́дпись (signature). We wanted to detect these families across the whole dictionary and show all relatives to each word. The obvious approach was to strip the suffixes, group everything that reduces to the same stem and that get us a long way: Пари́ж → парижа́нин, парижа́нка, пари́жский all collapsed to париж. But it broke in a lot of other cases, like парк the garden vs. паркова́ть to park a car got into the same family. And stress alone can fork a meaning (а́тлас an atlas vs. атла́с satin).
We brought in a language model only at the exact points where spelling can't decide, and ask it to rule like a dictionary editor. That fixed whether they are one family or two. парк got split; моро́з / моро́зить / моро́зный stayed together. In total we found 30,000 words in no family at all, including obvious orphans like продаве́ц, so we clustered the leftovers by shared prefix and had the model pull the real families out of each cluster. That last step matters because for example the красно- cluster looked like one neat group but was a city (Красноя́рск), a cabinetmaker, the Red Army, and eloquence, all just starting красно-.
The lesson that kept repeating: merging with just rules is dangerous. Three separate times - an aspect-pair that fused 636 unrelated words into one blob, a prefix merge that let прост swallow 40, a final reconciliation of two overlapping datasets - eager linking caused the worst failures, and each needed a guardrail and a refusal to guess.
The result: about 12,840 families over 66,000+ word entries, with ~5,000 flagged for human review, each carrying the model's written reasoning so our editors can re-check it.
16th June 2026
Wildcard search in the main search box, for everyone: use
*, e.g.по*тьor*ость.13th June 2026
Search results now show the gender of nouns.
9th June 2026
New /pro-account page explaining what Dict+ gets you, with screenshots.
11th May 2026
Russian words in the Usage Info section are now accented and clickable.
28th April 2026
New profile page.
27th April 2026
Added explanations for the verbs of motion (идти́ / ходи́ть and friends), including their prefixed forms.
2nd April 2026
Added numeral as a word type, with rendered declensions.
1st April 2026
New Dictionary page: browse all words with endless scrolling, filter pills and a list/grid toggle.
31st March 2026
Big grammar update: search within the grammar section, feedback per topic, and you can favorite guides.
19th March 2026
New Courses: structured lessons that walk you through a topic step by step.
30th January 2026
The first grammar guides are live - explanations of how Russian grammar works, each on its own page.
9th January 2026
Word pages now have a collocations section - the words that commonly go together with the entry.
9th January 2026
New exercise on the word page: pick the right form of the word to complete a sentence.
4th January 2026
Added pronouns, with full declension tables and an overview page.
31st December 2025
Your profile now shows the history of all your web payments.
28th December 2025
You can support OpenRussian with a donation now, and your donations show on your profile.
22nd December 2025
Dict+ accounts can now export their saved words.
21st November 2025
AI-powered search: ask a question and get a streamed answer. A Dict+ feature.
19th November 2025
Renamed the Pro Account to Dict+.
11th November 2025
Reworked the feedback form.
31st October 2025
The Radio in the Media section keeps playing as you browse - it no longer stops when you change pages.
30th September 2025
You can change your account email now, with a verification step.
28th September 2025
Words in example sentences now link to their accented word page, and the current word is highlighted.
28th September 2025
Aspect partners now share a page: the imperfective and perfective side by side (e.g. де́лать / сде́лать).
18th September 2025
Reworked the desktop header and front page, and redesigned the global search.
18th September 2025
New Top-500 vocabulary page - the 500 most useful Russian words in one list.
1st January 2024
We lost the news entries from summer 2023 to summer 2025 in a data migration. The site kept improving through that whole stretch, those updates just aren't recorded here.
28th March 2023
Massively improved the search results and also the display of them. Also after clicking a link in the search you can now go back to the search results.
24th March 2023
We completely reworked the Categories! We created new ones and completely redid all collections of words. Additionally we have verb-pairs in there now, an example sentence for each entry and a stylish AI picture to top it of.
18th March 2023
We switched our Text-to-Speech audio generation for sentences from AWS Polly to Yandex. The new voice sounds so much better! It cost a lot to run it over all words and sentences but we spare not expenses for our users!
8th March 2023
In the Media section there is a new tab "Radio". There you can now listen to more than 1000 Russian radio stations.
6th March 2023
Reworked register/login popup design.
23rd February 2023
Heavily reworked the Media section. It now features "Today's choices", "Videos", a placeholder for "Music" and the "Scenarios".
28th April 2022
First mini Media feed.
17th March 2022
You can save sentences to your list now, find them in My Words (thanks to user Las_par45 for the idea!)
1st March 2022
Improved search
9th February 2022
You can edit verb participles now
5th February 2022
Simplified the database schema, unified all forms into table words_forms
2nd December 2021
We started recording of all sentences with real voices (will take a long time to go through all >400,000 sentences)
15th October 2021
All scenarios now have audio recordings
26th September 2021
Dialogs linked from their vocabulary words
20th September 2021
We have a featured dialog on the front page now
4th August 2021
Database downloads now from TogetherDB, the best online database
8th May 2021
Words now can be tagged as colloquial or archaic
16th April 2021
Scenarios can now have audio as well - Yana is working on the recordings!
18th March 2021
New scenario area: New structure, stream-like and all free to view now
16th February 2021
New design, so beautiful!
1st February 2021
You can now display all sentences belonging to a word
1st February 2021
You can now report a word
17th June 2020
removed advertisements for everyone 🕺
13th June 2020
admins can add new words now
4th June 2020
added dozens of new words (with big thanks to Sandy!)
17th May 2020
can set "plural" as pseudo noun gender
3rd May 2020
word page shows word partner and other minor improvements
22nd April 2019
improved flashcard learning and introduced learning points
14th April 2019
finalized word vocabulary levels
5th March 2019
all learning methods now work with word difficulty levels
19th February 2019
translations can have info and example now
29th January 2019
translate with Google Translate (start page and search results)
21st December 2018
christmas hat for the logo 🎅
7th December 2018
extended the scenarios
27th November 2018
Google Translate integration on index page
23rd November 2018
New learning module: Sentence construction on each word page
18th November 2018
New website structure (pages Dictionary, My Words, Learn and Scenarios)
10th November 2018
You can now choose the website background in your profile
9th November 2018
Google Translate function in search for users with a Pro Account
6th November 2018
search result sentences highlight search term now
3rd November 2018
audio for sentences in search results
27th October 2018
~20% more words of the sentences are linked now
23rd October 2018
audio in wordlists and category lists
15th October 2018
You can now also edit the accents of words
12th October 2018
vocabulary: A1 + A2
9th October 2018
new word type "expression", for example добрый вечер
11th September 2018
each scenario now has a vocabulary list of the words used in it
30th August 2018
We developed scenarios about what to say in everyday situations like in a taxi, etc
24th August 2018
we have real word scenarios with dialogs now!
21st August 2018
russian keyboard improvement
20th August 2018
We now have a privacy page
21st June 2018
Words now have a 'usage info' section
8th June 2018
translations divided into primary and secondary newsEntries
22nd May 2018
new section "usage" for words
27th April 2018
words can now have tags
27th March 2018
new learning module: construct sentences
26th March 2018
Learning words by filling out sentences
12th February 2018
audio for all declensions, conjugations etc
7th February 2018
download of full words database
6th February 2018
Reading out of all declensions, conjugations and more!
30th January 2018
New database downloads at GitHub ^^
29th January 2018
Huge update to the word editing system
14th December 2017
Introduced tags
3rd October 2017
Redesign
20th September 2017
Introducing ads - sorry everyone!
2nd September 2017
Added sentences to start page
28th May 2017
Added more than 10 new categories
11th May 2017
All example sentences do show the stresses now for all words, where possible
30th March 2017
Besides declinations also conjugations now show a little hint when there is a stress change
28th March 2017
Links to other sources for words (see e.g. чудо) at the bottom
18th February 2017
Nouns now show when there is a stress change (see e.g. глаз)
18th February 2017
Showing short forms for adjectives
23rd December 2016
Ability to purchase a pro account to support the site (and to pay Amazon Polly)
20th December 2016
Integrated Text-to-Speech service Amazon Polly to read russian sentences and words we have no audio for
3rd November 2016
Deleted 3 000 false translation from the database
24th October 2016
The search now supports partial results. E.g. searching for 'dependent' gives results for 'self-dependent' and not only results for translations that begin with 'dependent'
27th September 2016
The website is now available via https, i.e. your visits on this website cannot be recorded by a middle man wiretapping the internet line
4th June 2016
When learning the flashcards now don't cycle endlessly but when marked as known get blocked for some time so a learning session can come to an end
18th May 2016
Trainer for you to learn your dictionary words with flashcards
28th April 2016
You can compose your own dictionary now when registered
27th February 2016
Mini restyling
12th February 2016
Language choices per flags
19th January 2016
Chosen language stored in cookie
28th October 2015
Enabled OpenSearch (e.g. in Chrome type openrussian.org->[tab key]->giraffe->enter)
27th October 2015
Adverbs have a link to their adjective
23rd August 2015
Editing of verbs (imperatives, past, present, future)
19th August 2015
The search supports numbers now, e.g. 1234
21st June 2015
Info for sentence/example editing
20th June 2015
Editing of adjectives' declensions (this was quite hard to implement actually)
13th June 2015
Added Natalija's and my beautiful pictures in contact :)
20th May 2015
The declensions of nouns are now editable
15th May 2015
Discover section to browse through the dictionary. Not sure if it will actually be used, we will see! ^^
2nd May 2015
New pages for English and German words, mostly for SEO, e.g. http://en.openrussian.org/en/mouse ^^
24th April 2015
Editing of word translations
12th April 2015
Support to enter russian letters in the search field with the keyboard icon
11th April 2015
Search for derived forms of a russian word
15th March 2015
Lots of optimization on the search
7th March 2015
Website translation to German and fetched German example sentences and word translations
21st February 2015
~150,000 example sentences from Tatoeba integrated.
8th February 2015
5,011 audio samples from Shtooka integrated.
5th February 2015
Lots of Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
31st January 2015
Going live
29th January 2015
New website layout
15th January 2015
First data from Wiktionary and Dicipedia
7th January 2015
Start
