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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.
Hundreds of Russian words that look like an English word and mean something else.
Some pairs may be inaccurate. Find one? Hit ⋯ on its row and say what should be there instead.
Partly marks a word that can mean the English word, but usually means something else; click it to see every meaning. Think one is really a cognate? Hit ⋯ on its row.
| # | Top definition | ?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. | ?How many letters apart the two words are once the Russian one is written in Latin letters, in whichever usual way comes closest: ш as sh or ch, т as t or th. 0 means spelled alike; лимон, written limon, is 1 letter from lemon, and национальный, written nationalny, is 2 from national. | 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 and to backfill missed cognates.
The false friends came out of the same funnel: Russian words within a few letters of an English word once transliterated, whose meanings part ways in the vector spaces or in the dictionary. Each was checked against the Russian word's English Wiktionary definitions, with Claude Sonnet 5.5 writing the short top definition shown.
Partly marks a word whose meanings only partly overlap with the English word's.
The origin pill comes from English Wiktionary's etymologies. A shared loan is a word both languages took from a third one, most often Latin, Greek or French; a direct loan went from English into Russian or from Russian into English; an inherited pair is one both languages kept from Proto-Indo-European (мать / mother).
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. Spelling distance counts the letters you'd change to turn the Russian word, written in Latin letters, into the English one, writing it whichever usual way comes closest: ш as sh or ch, т as t or th. A Russian ending counts like any other letters, so национальный, written nationalny, is 2 from national. 0 means the two are spelled alike.
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), Princeton WordNet and English Wiktionary (CC BY-SA 4.0, via kaikki.org). List last regenerated 2026-10-17.
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