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Russian words you already know
Over 5,000 Russian words that look like an English word and mean the same thing.
Some pairs may be inaccurate. Find one? Hit ⋯ on its row and say what should be there instead.
| # | ?How common the Russian word is, on the Zipf scale: the base-10 logarithm of its occurrences per billion words of text. 3 means about once per million words and 5 about a hundred per million; most everyday words sit between 4 and 6. Counts come from wordfreq. | Report |
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▶ How this list was made
A cognate here means a Russian word a learner can recognize from English: it looks similar once transliterated and it means roughly the same thing. Loanwords in both directions count; a shared Latin root with a different meaning does not.
Every pair was computed using Levenshtein distance and two Procrustes-aligned Russian and English vector spaces. Each Russian lemma was transliterated several ways and compared with English words by edit distance; pairs that looked alike were kept only when their meanings were also close, measured with English and Russian word embeddings aligned into one space. Marginal calls were fed through Claude Sonnet 5.5 for final adjudication.
Frequency is the Russian word's Zipf score: 3 means about once per million words of text, 4 about ten per million, 5 about a hundred. Match blends the two similarity measures into one 0–100 number; a higher score means the words look and mean more alike, not that the pair is more certainly right.
Built with fastText word vectors (CC BY-SA 3.0), wordfreq (data CC BY-SA 4.0, which credits SUBTLEX, OpenSubtitles, Google Books Ngrams and Wikipedia) and Princeton WordNet. List last regenerated 2026-10-10.
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