When, at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, the publishing house of M. O. Wolf conceived to carry out the third edition of V. I. Dahl's Explanatory Dictionary of the Living Great Russian Language (the first edition was published in 1863-1866; V. I. Dahl did not have time to complete the preparation of the second, corrected and supplemented edition, it was published posthumously in 1880-1882).It proceeded from the fact that this dictionary represents "all the available words and turns of native speech, with all local features and shades" and, therefore, the new edition is necessary for society as a guide to current word usage. This point of view was shared by well-known scientists at the time, despite the fact that the dictionary was far from academic requirements. Did the publishing house and editors have the opportunity to radically change the dictionary of V. I. Dahl or to create on its basis some other, perhaps more correct in scientific terms? To answer this question, you need to imagine what Dahl's dictionary was then, at the end of the XIX century. In his famous "Naputny Slovo" V. I. Dahl wrote that the goal of his work was "to develop an educated language from the national language". For the first time in Russian lexicography, he combined book vocabulary (taken from academic dictionaries)in a dictionary with the words of a live folk speech. "Explanatory dictionary of the living Great Russian language" turned out to be huge in volume (over two hundred thousand words). And yet, despite such an unprecedented volume even for our time, it was not in the strict sense of the word a thesaurus, that is, a dictionary that represents the language in all its fullness of literary and regional vocabulary. Dahl did not set such a goal for himself: from the academic "Dictionary of Church Slavonic and Russian" (1847, about 115 thousand words) page 47 he did not include about 15 thousand words in his dictionary, abandoning many church-book and outdated words. From colloq ... Read more