Things that start with short e

Short E: Phonetic CHILDREN'S DICTIONARY

echidna The echidna is a primitive, spiny, egg-laying mammal from Australia and New Guinea. It is also called the spiny anteater.

echolocation In echolocation (also called sonar), a high-pitched sound (usually clicks) is sent out. The sound bounces off the object and some returns. The returning echo is interpreted to determine the object's shape, direction, distance, and texture. Dolphins (and other toothed whales) and some bats use sonar to navigate and find prey.

Edison, Thomas Thomas Alva Edison (1847-1931) was an American inventor whose many inventions revolutionized the world. His work improved the light bulb; he invented the phonograph, the carbon telephone transmitter, and the motion-picture projector.

Edmontonia An armored, plant-eating dinosaur from North America.

Edmontosaurus Edmontosaurus was a duck-billed dinosaur.

egg Many animals hatch from eggs. Dinosaurs hatched from eggs.

egg carton An egg carton holds eggs and keep them from breaking.

eggplant An eggplant is a purple vegetable.

elbow The elbow is the joint in the middle of your arm.

embryo An embryo is a very young, unborn organism.

emerald An emerald is a hard, shiny, deep green jewel.

emerald tree boa The emerald tree boa is a tree-dwelling nocturnal snake from South American rain forests.

emperor An emperor is an unelected ruler of a country.

emperor angelfish The emperor angelfish is a brightly-colored, flattened fish that lives in shallow warm waters.

emperor penguin The emperor penguin is the largest penguin; it lives on ice packs in Antarctica.

empty When something is empty, it has nothing in it. The jug above is empty.

energy Everything needs energy to work or act. Some types of energy include electrical energy, mechanical energy, and potential energy.

engine The engine of a train pulls the railroad cars along the track.

experiment People do experiments to learn about the physical world or to test theories.

explorer An explorer explores unknown places and discovers new things. For example, Magellan was an explorer who led the first expedition that sailed around the Earth.

extinct When a group of animals or plants goes extinct, they are gone forever. Some extinct animals include dinosaurs, saber-toothed cats, and dodo birds.

x-ray An x-ray is a special, high-energy picture of your bones or teeth.

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100+ Short E Words in English

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What are short E words? Like every vowel, the letter e has what are called a long sound and a short sound. The letter e is one of the most used vowels in then English language and it is helpful to know when and how to use the short e sound correctly.

There are seven common ways to spell words with the short e sound, and it can be easily be confused with short vowel words: vowel a vowel i sounds. With that being said, the majority of short e words quite simply contain just the letter e. Several of the different spelling patterns to make the short e sound only apply to a few words.

Table of Contents

Short E Words

What are Short E Words?

Short e words are words where the e is relaxed, like “eh”, and does not sound like it’s name, “ee”. It is common to learn the short e sound first before learning the long e sound and words. It is also easier to learn the short e words that use the letter e before moving to the other spelling patterns that make the short e sound.

It is most common for short e words to be spelled with just the letter e, but sometimes words will make the short e sound without having the letter e in the word at all. Below are some examples and six of the most common different ways in which to write short e words.

Ways to Spell Short E

The short e is usually seen as the letter e and pronounced as “eh”. A few examples of this are egg, elephant, and end.

There are a few other options for spelling the short e sound in words:

• a – many
• ea – head
• ai – said
• ie – friend
• ei – heifer
• eo – leopard

When you see words with these different short e spelling patterns, it can be helpful to say them slowly and recognize when your tongue makes the short e sound “eh”. This can help you remember that although the spelling looks different, it still sounds the same and you’ll know how to correctly identify a short e word. It is also helpful to take a closer look at the short e words that don’t have the letter e in them to help remember those words for correct spelling when going to write them.

List of Short E Words

e

• bed
• beg
• Ben
• belt
• best
• bet
• cent
• den
• desk
• fed
• gem
• get
• gel
• help
• hen
• hem
• jet
• keg
• kept
• led
• leg
• lemon
• let
• men
• mess
• met
• neck
• net
• pen
• peg
• pet
• red
• set
• ten
• them
• Ted
• vet
• yet
• wed
• went
• west
• wet

a

• any
• many

ea

• ahead
• already
• bread
• breakfast
• breast
• dead
• deaf
• displeasure
• dread
• endeavor
• feather
• head
• health
• heaven
• instead
• jealous
• lead (metal)
• leather
• leaven
• meadow
• measure
• ocean
• pageant
• realm
• sergeant
• steadfast
• steady
• spread
• sweat
• sweater
• treasure
• thread
• threat
• treacherous
• tread
• weapon
• weather
• wealth

ai

• again
• against
• creme fraiche
• said

ie

• befriend
• boyfriend
• friend
• friendly
• friendship
• girlfriend
• unfriend
• unfriendly

ei

• heifer
• leisure (proper English pronounces this like a short e sound, while some American English might pronounce this with a long e sound)

eo

• jeopardy
• Leonard
• leopard

Short E Words | Image

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20 things you need to know about Dahl's dictionary • Arzamas

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Prepared by Dmitry Sichinava

1. Dahl's dictionary - legend

Dahl's dictionary plays a very special role in Russian culture, much more than the role of other monumental lexicographic projects of the 19th century in the respective cultures - Littre's "Dictionary of the French Language" or the "German Dictionary" of the Brothers Grimm  The Brothers Grimm managed to bring their dictionary only to the letter F; it was completed only in 1971. Not only did Dahl's dictionary become an extraordinarily important text in itself - a national treasure, a source of a truly folk word for generations of Russian people; around him grew his own mythology.

Since childhood, the Soviet reader learned how the young officer Dal began to collect a dictionary, having heard from the driver the unusual word "rejuvenates". (In turn, next to this story, a jingoistic anecdote appeared: “It’s getting younger,” the coachman repeated and added: “I need to hang on, balin. It would be nice to get to the vechel. But-oh-oh!”) Pushkin (the poet called his frock coat “crawl out”, having heard from Dr. Dahl this popular name for a discarded snake skin, and then Dahl sacredly kept his friend’s “crawl out” pierced by a bullet). Of course, one could not forget about Dahl's ardent patriotism (the son of a Dane emphasized his love for Russia, strove to replace foreign words with neologisms, and accepted Orthodoxy before his death).

2. Each word in the dictionary name is no coincidence

Dahl's dictionary from the very beginning was a polemical enterprise - the author contrasted it with dictionaries prepared by scientists of the Russian Academy (since 1841 - the Academy of Sciences). In the famous title "Explanatory Dictionary of the Living Great Russian Language", a combat program is read, partly deciphered by the author himself in the preface.

The author conceived:

a) an explanatory dictionary, that is, “explaining and interpreting” words using specific examples (often a successful example replaces the element of interpretation). Dahl contrasted the “dry and useless” definitions of the academic dictionary, which are “the wiser the simpler the subject,” with descriptions of the thesaurus type: instead of defining the word “table”, he lists the components of the table, types of tables, etc.;

b) a dictionary of the “living” language, without vocabulary peculiar only to church books (unlike the dictionary of the Academy, which, in accordance with the instructions of Admiral Shishkov, was called the “Dictionary of the Church Slavonic and Russian Language”), with careful use of borrowed and tracing words, but with the active involvement of dialect material;

c) a dictionary of the “Great Russian” language, that is, not claiming to cover Ukrainian and Belarusian material (although, under the guise of “southern” and “western” dialect words, a lot from these territories also entered the dictionary). Dahl regarded the dialects of "Little and White Russia" as something "completely alien" and incomprehensible to native Russian speakers.

By design, Dahl's dictionary is not only and not so much literary ("dead" book words, the compiler did not like), but also dialectal, and not describing any local dialect or group of dialects, but covering a variety of dialects of a language spread over a vast territory. At the same time, Dal, although he was an ethnographer, traveled a lot and was interested in various aspects of Russian life, did not go on special dialectological expeditions, did not develop questionnaires and did not write down entire texts. He communicated with people while traveling on other business (this is how the legendary rejuvenates ) or listened to the speech of visitors in large cities (this is how the last four words of the dictionary were collected, recorded by the servants on behalf of the dying Dahl).

Pyotr Boborykin describes in his memoirs the well-known method of collecting material — “for credit” —

“…high school teachers went to see him [Dal]. Through one of them, L-n, a grammar teacher, he obtained from the schoolchildren all kinds of sayings and jokes from the raznochinsk spheres. Whoever delivered a certain number of new proverbs and sayings to L-n, he gave him five of the grammar. So, at least, they said both in the city [Nizhny Novgorod] and in the gymnasium.

3. Dahl compiled a dictionary alone

Perhaps the most impressive thing in the history of the dictionary's creation is how its author, while not a professional linguist, collected the material and wrote all the articles alone. Large authoritative dictionaries were made and are being made independently not only in the 19th century, in the era of universal talents, but also in times closer to us - remember Ozhegov's "Dictionary of the Russian Language" However, Ozhegov very actively used the achievements of Ushakov's collective dictionary, in the preparation of which participated himself. , Fasmer's Etymological Dictionary of the Russian Language or Zalizniak's Grammatical Dictionary of the Russian Language. Such dictionaries are perhaps even more complete and more successful than the cumbersome products of multi-headed teams, in which the project is not limited by the duration of a human life, no one is in a hurry, the idea is constantly changing, someone works better, someone worse, and that's all - differently.

Dahl still used some external sources, including those collected by the Academy (remember how a gymnasium teacher wrote down “sayings and jokes” for him), although he constantly complained about their unreliability, tried to double-check every word, and marked the ones that were not rechecked with a question mark . The burden of the huge work of collecting, preparing for printing and proofreading the material constantly caused him lamentations to burst onto the pages of the dictionary (see below).

However, the material he collected turned out to be generally reliable, quite complete and necessary for a modern researcher; this is a testament to how sharp his ear for language and intuition was - for all the lack of scientific information.

4. As Dahl's main business, the dictionary was evaluated only after his death

Dal later became known as a lexicographer: he made his debut in prose as early as 1830, and the first issue of the first volume of the Explanatory Dictionary of the Living Great Russian Language came out only in 1861. At the same time, if you take the bound first volume of the first edition, then on the title page stands 1863. Few people know that the dictionary, like many other publications of the 19th century, came out in separate editions (having their own covers and title pages), which were then bound into volumes; at the same time, the covers and titles of the issues were usually simply thrown away, and only a few copies of them survived. .

Despite the prize that the Dalev dictionary was awarded during his lifetime, and the extensive controversy in the press, contemporaries, judging by the memoirs, often perceived interest in the language and compiling a Russian lexicon as only one of Dalev's versatile talents and eccentricities. In sight were other aspects of his bright personality that had previously manifested - a writer, author of popular fairy tales and stories from folk life under the pseudonym Cossack Lugansky, military doctor, engineer, public figure, eccentric, sophisticated ethnographer. In 1847 Belinsky wrote with ardent praise:

“... from his writings it is clear that he is an experienced person in Russia; his memories and stories refer both to the west and to the east, and to the north and south, and to the borders and to the center of Russia; of all our writers, not excluding Gogol, he pays special attention to the common people, and it is clear that he studied them for a long time and with participation, knows their life to the smallest detail, knows how the Vladimir peasant differs from the Tver one, and in relation to shades of morals, and in relation to ways of life and trades.

This is where Belinsky would have to say about the language of Dalevsky prose, about folk catchphrases - but no.

Dal, of course, was included in the gallery of "Russian eccentrics", "originals" of the 19th century, who were fond of various unusual and impractical things. Among them were spiritualism (Dal started a "medium circle") and homeopathy, which Dahl at first ardently criticized, and then became its apologist. In a narrow circle of fellow doctors who gathered at Dahl's in Nizhny Novgorod, they spoke Latin and played chess for four. According to fellow surgeon Nikolai Pirogov, Dahl “had a rare ability to imitate the voice, gestures, mine of other people; with extraordinary calmness and the most serious mien, he conveyed the most comical scenes, imitated sounds (the buzzing of a fly, a mosquito, etc.) incredibly true, ”and also masterfully played the organ (harmonica). In this he resembled Prince Vladimir Odoevsky - also a prose writer approved by Pushkin, also fairy tales, also music, spiritualism and elixirs.

That Dahl's main business is a dictionary, they noticed, in fact, already after his death. The first edition of the dictionary was completed in 1866. Vladimir Ivanovich Dal died in 1872, and in 1880–1882 a second, posthumous edition prepared by the author was published. It was typed from a special author's copy of the first edition, in which a blank sheet was sewn into each spread, where Dahl wrote down his additions and corrections. This copy has been preserved and is in the Department of Manuscripts of the Russian National (Public) Library in St. Petersburg. Thus, in 1877, in the “Diary of a Writer”, Dostoevsky, discussing the meaning of words, uses the combination “future Dal” in an almost nominal sense. In the next era, this understanding will become universally recognized.

5. Dahl believed that literacy was dangerous for peasants

Dahl's public position caused a great resonance among his contemporaries: in the era of great reforms, he saw the danger in teaching peasants to read and write - without other measures of "moral and mental development" and real familiarization with culture .

“...Literacy in itself is not enlightenment, but only a means to achieve it; if it is used not for this, but for another thing, then it is harmful. <...> Allow a person to express his conviction, not embarrassed by exclamations, zealots of education, although in respect of the fact that this person has 37,000 peasants in nine counties and nine rural schools at his disposal. <...> Intellectual and moral education can reach a significant degree without literacy; on the contrary, literacy, without any intellectual and moral education, and with the most unsuitable examples, almost always leads to bad things. Having made a person literate, you aroused needs in him, which you do not satisfy with anything, but leave him at a crossroads. <…>

What will you answer me to this if I prove to you nominal lists that out of 500 people who studied at 10 years in nine rural schools, 200 people became famous scoundrels?

Vladimir Dal. Note on Literacy (1858)

Dahl's idea is mentioned by many publicists and writers of the era. The democrat Nekrasov wrote ironically: “Literacy is not without art / The venerable Dal pounced - / And he discovered a lot of feelings, / Both nobility and morality,” and the vengeful Shchedrin, as usual, recalled this repeatedly, for example: “... Dal at that time defended the Russian peasant to illiteracy, on the grounds that you teach, say, a locksmith to read and write, he will immediately begin to forge the keys to other people's caskets. Years later, the philosopher Konstantin Leontiev sympathetically recalled Dahl's anti-pedagogical pathos in an article with the eloquent title "How and how is our liberalism harmful?", where he complained about liberals responding "with laughter or silence" to "a person who is direct or not afraid of original thought."

The lifetime reputation of an obscurantist is remarkable both for its wide distribution and for the fact that it was quickly forgotten - already at the turn of the century, not to mention Soviet times, Dal was perceived as an educator and populist.

6. Dahl wrote the word "Russian" with one "s"

The full name of Dahl's dictionary is quite widely known, and many will remember that according to the old spelling, the words "living Great Russian" are written through "a". But few people notice that Dahl actually wrote the second of these words through one "s". Yes, the collector of the Russian word insisted that it was precisely "Russian". The dictionary itself gives the following explanation:

“They used to write Pravda Ruska; only Poland called us Russia, Russians, Russians, in Latin spelling, and we adopted this, transferred it to our Cyrillic alphabet and write Russian!”

Dahl's historical and linguistic judgments are often incorrect: of course, the name Russia is historically not Polish and not Latin, but Greek, and in Old Russian the word Russian , with the second "s" in the suffix, was quite. Dal did not favor double consonants and in general (as we see from the word Cyrillic ).

Only at the beginning of the 20th century, the linguist Ivan Baudouin de Courtenay, who prepared the third edition of the dictionary, introduced the normative spelling (with two "s") into the text.

7. In Dahl's dictionary there are indeed words invented by him, but very few

Among the mass ideas about Dahl's dictionary there is also the following: Dahl invented everything (or a lot), composed, people don't really say that. It is quite common, let us recall at least a vivid episode from "My century ..." Mariengof:

“Father, of course, had Dahl’s explanatory dictionary in the library. This book, in my opinion, is priceless. What wealth of words! What sayings! Proverbs! Hints and riddles! Of course, they are about one third invented by Dahl. But what of that? Nothing. It is important that they are well thought out. This explanatory dictionary in a gold-embossed cover was not just Nastenka's favorite book, but some kind of her treasure. She kept it under her pillow. I read and re-read every day. Like an Old Believer Bible. From him, from Dahl, this wonderful Russian speech came from Nastya. And when she first came to Penza directly from her Saransk village Chernye Bugry, there was nothing like that at all - Nastenka used to say, grayishly, like everyone else.

In Pasternak's "Doctor Zhivago" there is a less enthusiastic expression of the same thought: "This is a kind of new Dal, just as invented, a linguistic graphomania of verbal incontinence."

How much did Dahl really invent? Is everything in his vocabulary “living Great Russian”? Of course, there are also bookish neologisms in the dictionary, and quite fresh ones at that: for example, the expression in March , as "they say in memory of Gogol", and the word dekabrist , as "former state criminals were called." And what did the lexicographer himself write?

The Ethnographic Department of the Russian Geographical Society, awarding Dahl's dictionary with the Gold Konstantinov medal, asked the compiler to enter the words "with a reservation where and how they were reported to the compiler" in order to avoid criticism "that he puts words and speeches that are contrary to him in the dictionary of the folk language spirit, and therefore apparently fictitious. " Responding to this remark (in the article “Answer to the Sentence” published in the first volume of the dictionary), Dahl admitted that he occasionally introduces words into the dictionary that “have not been in use hitherto”, for example dexterity , as an interpretation-substitution for foreign words ( gymnastics ). But he puts them not as independent articles, but only among interpretations, and with a question mark, as if "offering" them for discussion. Another similar technique was the use of a word that really exists in some dialect to interpret a foreign language (for example, zhivulya - automatic   ZHIVULIA , zhivulka, zh. vologodsk. carnivorous insect, flea, louse, etc. || Everything is alive, but unintelligent. Is she sitting, a living little girl, on a living chair, tugging at living meat? || Baby. || Automaton?"), "in a sense in which it, perhaps, has not been accepted until now" (that is, a new meaning is being invented for a real-life word - the so-called semantic neologism). Justifying the inclusion in the dictionary of various unusual-sounding verbal names ( , ,0033 allowance and allowance ), Dahl referred to the fact that they are formed "according to the living composition of our language" and that he had nothing to refer to, as soon as the "Russian ear". On this path, he had a most authoritative predecessor - Pushkin, who wrote almost the same:

“The magazines condemned the words: clap , talk and top as an unsuccessful innovation. These words are native Russian. “Bova came out of the tent to cool off and heard people’s talk and a horse’s top in the open field” (The Tale of Bova Korolevich). Clap is used colloquially instead of clapping , like spike instead of hissing :

He let the thorn go like a snake.
(Ancient Russian poems)

Should not interfere with the freedom of our rich and beautiful language.

"Eugene Onegin", note 31

In general, the percentage of "invented" in Dahl is very low, and researchers identify such words without difficulty: Dahl himself indicated what types they belong to.

A large number of words noted by Dahl are not only confirmed by modern dialectological studies, but also most convincingly demonstrate their reality through comparison with ancient Russian monuments, including those inaccessible to Dahl even theoretically. For example, in Novgorod birch bark letters, which have been found since 1951 (including in the most ancient ones - the 11th-13th centuries), there are parallels with the words known from Dahl: buy in - become a partner in business, Offer - Horning puppy, Assassplant - Inquiry, Investigation, Lodny - Fish, Siga breed, Porali - The same as the Powder, Plah - Popopoli - first, 33333333 mail - an honorary gift, estimate - add, inquire - inquire on occasion, proverb - notoriety, get off - remove, try to - arrange business, 903 34 - property, tula - secluded place, gutted fish - not gutted; as well as with phraseological units the abyss from the eyes , bow to your money (the latter was found almost verbatim in a letter of the XIII century).

8. The order in the dictionary is not strictly alphabetical

In Dahl's dictionary there are about 200 thousand words and about 80 thousand "nests": single-root non-prefixed words do not stand in alphabetical order, replacing each other, but occupy a common large article from a separate paragraph, within which they are sometimes additionally grouped according to semantic links. In a similar way, only more radically, the first "Dictionary of the Russian Academy" was built. The "nested" principle may not be very convenient for searching for words, but it turns dictionary entries into fascinating reading.

On the other hand, separate articles, which is also unusual for our time, are prepositional-case combinations that “fell out” of the nest (obviously, Dal perceived them as adverbs written separately). These include one of the most memorable entries in the dictionary:

FOR VODKA, for wine, for tea, for tea, a gift in small money for a service, beyond the ranks. When God created a German, a Frenchman, an Englishman, etc., and asked them if they were content, they responded with satisfaction; Russian also, but asked for vodka. The orderly and from death asks for wine (bast painting). You pull a guy out of the water, and he asks for vodka for that. Lead money , tip money, data for vodka.

9. Dahl was a bad etymologist

In establishing the relationship of words and their belonging to a common nest, Dahl was often mistaken. He did not have a linguistic education. However, in that era it was still a rarity, and it was not an indispensable attribute of a professional: for example, the great Slavist (and also the compiler of an invaluable dictionary, only Old Russian) Izmail Ivanovich Sreznevsky was a lawyer., And in general, a scientific the approach to language was alien to Dahl - perhaps even consciously. In the "Password" to the dictionary, he admitted that with grammar

"from the beginning he was in some kind of discord, not being able to apply it to our language and avoiding it, not so much out of reason, but out of some kind of dark feeling, so that it would not confuse . .."

On the second page, we see, albeit with a question mark, the convergence of the words abrek (although, it would seem, it is marked that it is Caucasian!) and doomed to . Further, Dal combines in one nest drawbar (borrowed from German) and breathe , space and simple and many others, and a number of cognate words, on the contrary, do not reduce. Subsequently, the erroneous division into nests was, if possible, corrected in the edition edited by I. A. Baudouin de Courtenay (see below).

10. Dahl's dictionary can be read consecutively like a work of art

Dahl created a dictionary that can not only be used as a reference, but also read as a collection of essays. The reader is faced with rich ethnographic information: of course, it does not belong to the dictionary interpretation in the narrow sense, but without it it is difficult to imagine the everyday context of the terms themselves.

That's what handshake is - two or three words and you can't say:

“beating the hands of the fathers of the bride and groom, usually covering their hands with the skirts of caftans, as a sign of final consent; the end of courtship and the beginning of wedding ceremonies: engagement, conspiracy, blessing, betrothal, engagement, big singing…”

Here is another example that vividly depicts the atmosphere of a wedding:

"The matchmaker was in a hurry to the wedding, she was drying her shirt on a whorl, the warrior was rolling on the threshold!"

The reader can learn about the epistolary etiquette of previous generations:

“In the old days sovereign or sovereign used indifferently, vm. gentleman, gentleman, landowner, nobleman; until now we speak and write to the king: Most Merciful Sovereign ; great. princes: Gracious Sovereign ; to all private individuals: Gracious Sovereign [our fathers wrote, to the highest: Gracious Sovereign ; to equal: my dear sir ; to the lowest: my sovereign ]".

An encyclopedic entry amazing in detail is given with the word bast shoes (which fell into nest paw ). We note the involvement of not only “living Great Russian”, but also “Little Russian” (Ukrainian, more specifically, Chernigov) material:

LAPOT, m . lapotok; bast, bast, m. postols, south. app. (German Vasteln), short wicker shoes on the foot, ankle-deep, made of bast (striders), bast (bast, worse), less often from the bark of willow, willow (verzni, willows), tala (sheluzhniki), elm (elm), birch (bark), oak (oak), from thin roots (root), from the flakes of a young oak (dubachi, Chernihiv ), from hemp sacks, broken shabby ropes (kurps, krutsy, chuni, whisperers), from horse manes and tails (hairs), finally, from straw (straws, kursk. ). The bast shoe is woven in 5–12 lines, bundles, on a block, a kochedyk, a cat (iron hook, pile) and consists of a wattle (sole), head, firebrands (front), ear, collar (border from the sides) and a heel; but bad bast shoes, in a simple braid, without a collar, and are fragile; the collar or border converges at the heel and, when connected, forms a guard, a kind of loop into which the collars are threaded. The transverse basts, bent on the collar, are called kurts; there are usually ten kurtsy in a wattle fence. Sometimes the bast shoes are still picked, they pass over the wattle fence with a bast or tow; and hand-painted bast shoes are decorated with a patterned undercut. Bast shoes are put on tailor and woolen linings and tied with frills in a binding crosswise to the knee; bast shoes without frills for home and yard, weave higher than usual and are called: kapets, kakotas, kalti, shoe covers, tricks, chuyki, little tables, whisperers, frogs, feet, bare feet, topygs, etc.

11.

Modern lexicography, especially foreign lexicography, has come to the conclusion that the interpretation of many words cannot (or is unreasonably difficult) be given without graphic illustration. But a full-fledged authoritative illustrated Russian explanatory dictionary, unfortunately, has not yet appeared (one can only name “picture dictionaries” for foreigners and recent dictionaries of foreign words for Russians). In this, Dahl was far ahead of not only his own, but also our time: he provided two articles with pictures. Article hat is drawn what types of hats are, and you can distinguish by the silhouette of hairpins Moscow from hairpin even , and kasnik from tops . And in article beef (nest beef ) a pensive cow is shown, divided into parts indicated by numbers - among them, in addition to the usual sternum, shank and loin, there are, for example, underplows and a curl.

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Russian State Library

12. Dahl complained about the severity of the work directly in articles

On the pages of his dictionary, Dahl often complains about the severity of the work undertaken. Complaints of the lexicographer is an old and venerable genre, started on Russian soil by Feofan Prokopovich, who translated the poems of the 16th-century French humanist Scaliger as follows:

If someone is condemned to torture,
the poor head of sorrow and torment awaits.
They did not order to torment him with the work of difficult forges,
nor send to the hard work of the ore places.
Let the lexicon do: that alone is sufficient,
All labor pains this one labor has in itself.

But Dahl's work is notable for the fact that the complaints are not included in the preface, but are scattered over the articles (moreover, their number naturally increases in the last volumes of the dictionary):

Volume . The volume of the dictionary is large, one can not do it.

Determine. The simpler and more common a thing, the more difficult it is to define it in a general and abstract way; Define, for example, what is a table?

P . This is a favorite consonant of Russians, especially at the beginning of a word (as in the middle about ), and takes up (prepositions) a quarter of the entire dictionary.

Collaborator (in nest Collaborative ). Grim had many accomplices in compiling the dictionary.

Check . Edit the set for printing, keep proofreading. You can’t write more than a sheet of this dictionary a day, your eyes won’t.

As a kind of “offering of descendants” to Dahl’s feat, one can consider an example from the fourth volume of the dictionary compiled by G. O. Vinokur and S. I. Ozhegov, edited by Ushakov:

Employee . Dahl compiled his dictionary alone, without employees.

13. Dahl's dictionary experienced a second birth

Ivan Alexandrovich Baudouin de Courtenay, one of the greatest linguists in the history of science, played a major role in the history of Dahl's dictionary. Suffice it to say that basic linguistic concepts phonemes and morphemes were invented by his colleague, who died early Nikolai Krushevsky (Baudouin introduced them into scientific circulation), and the founder of the new Western linguistics Ferdinand de Saussure read the works of Baudouin carefully and referred to them .. Ivan (Jan) Alexandrovich was a Pole , whose family boldly claimed descent from the royal house of Capet: his namesake, also Baudouin de Courtenay, sat on the throne of Constantinople conquered by the Crusaders in the 13th century. According to the legend, when the professor, who went out to a political demonstration, was taken to the station together with the students, Ivan Aleksandrovich wrote in the police questionnaire: "King of Jerusalem. " Passion for politics did not leave him even later: having moved to independent Poland after the revolution, Baudouin defended national minorities, including Russians, and almost became the first president of Poland. And it’s good that he didn’t: the elected president was shot by a right-wing extremist five days later.

In 1903-1909, a new (third) edition of Dahl's dictionary was published, edited by Baudouin, supplemented by 20 thousand new words (missed by Dahl or appeared in the language after him). Of course, a professional linguist could not leave in place the bold hypothesis about the relationship of the words abrek and to doom ; etymologies were corrected, the nests were streamlined, unified, the dictionary became more convenient for searching, and the "Russian" language became "Russian". Ivan Alexandrovich neatly marked his additions with square brackets, showing respect and sensitivity to Dahl's original idea.

However, in Soviet times this version of the dictionary was not republished, in particular because of risky additions (see below).

14. Russian obscenity was well known to Dahl, but added to the dictionary after his death

The edition of Baudouin de Courtenay entered the mass consciousness not because of the scientific side itself: for the first time (and almost the last time) in the history of mass domestic lexicography, obscene vocabulary was included in the dictionary. Baudouin justified it this way:

"A lexicographer has no right to cut and castrate a 'living language'. Since well-known words exist in the minds of the vast majority of the people and constantly pour out, the lexicographer is obliged to enter them into the dictionary, even if all the hypocrites and tartuffes, who are usually great lovers of greasiness in secret, rebel against this and pretend to be indignant ... "

Of course, Russian swearing was well known to Dahl himself, but due to traditional delicacy, the corresponding lexemes and phraseological units were not included in his dictionary. Only in article to swearing Dahl outlined dialectological views on this subject:

, cursing, swearing, cursing, vilifying obscenely. This swearing is characteristic of a tall, aka, southern. and app. adverb, but in the low surrounding, sowing. and east. it is less common, and in some places it is not there at all .

Professor Baudouin approached the plot more thoroughly and included all the main, as he put it, "vulgar abuse" in their alphabetic places, noting, in particular, that a three-letter word "becomes almost a pronoun." This became an event, and references to the Baudouin Dictionary, which was not reprinted in the USSR, became a popular euphemism:

“Further there was a continuous Volga elocvention, which was not reflected even in the additions of prof. Baudouin de Courtenay to Dahl's Dictionary.

Alexey Krylov, shipbuilder. "My memories"

“And all these professors and academicians began to bend such expressions that there was no Dahl dictionary of issue 1909. It was in 1909 that the 4th volume of the dictionary with the letter "X" was published. no need".

Mikhail Uspensky. Red Tomatoes

15. According to Dahl's dictionary, both Russian people and foreigners learned the language

From about the 1880s to the 1930s, Dahl's Dictionary (in the original or in the Baudouin edition) was the standard guide to the Russian language for all writers or readers. There was especially nowhere else to “check the word”, apart from numerous dictionaries of foreign words (the old lexicons from the times of Dashkova or Shishkov became the property of history, and the new academic dictionary that was being prepared just in these years, edited by Grot and Shakhmatov, remained unfinished). Surprisingly, a huge vocabulary, no less than half consisting of dialecticisms, was also used by foreigners studying Russian. At 19In 09, after the Russo-Japanese War, the Japanese, reconciled with Russia, with their inherent thoroughness, placed an order for a batch of copies of the Explanatory Dictionary, which were supplied to "all regimental libraries and all military educational institutions in Japan."

Dahl's dictionary became very popular in Russian society, and people who seemed to be far from philology were also interested in it. The leader of the Cadets, Pavel Milyukov, may have coined the biting word "Aziopa" while looking at the spines of the first three volumes (A-Z, I-O, P). The leader of the Bolsheviks, Vladimir Ulyanov-Lenin, for the first time, "unfortunately and to my shame," who discovered Dal at the age of 50, "praised the talented author": "A magnificent thing," but immediately added: "but this is a regional dictionary and outdated. " The word "regional" for Ilyich probably also had an unpleasant political connotation - this was the name of the regional autonomists and separatists, primarily the movement for the self-government of Siberia.

16. Yesenin and Remizov took "wealth of folk speech" from Dahl's dictionary

At the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, writers of various trends actively turned to Dahl: some wanted to diversify their own vocabulary and saturate it with unusual-sounding words, others wanted to look close to the people, to give their writings a dialect flavor. Chekhov also spoke ironically about “one writer-populist”, who takes the words “from Dahl and Ostrovsky”, later this image will also flash in other authors.

Among the petty-bourgeois and peasant lyricists of the 19th century - from Koltsov to Drozhzhin - there are very few dialecticisms, they try to write "like gentlemen", they pass an exam for mastering a great culture. But the new peasant modernist poets, led by Klyuev and Yesenin, exaggerate lexical colors to the utmost. But at the same time, they do not take everything from their native dialects, they even invent something, and Dal, of course, serves as an important source for them (Professor I. N. Rozanov used to catch embarrassed Yesenin reading it).

The way for the peasants, of course, was pointed out by the intelligentsia. Klyuev's predecessors were urban stylists of folklore and reenactors of paganism Alexei Remizov, Sergei Gorodetsky and Alexei N. Tolstoy, who carefully studied the Explanatory Dictionary. And later, the "Kyiv Mallarmé" Vladimir Makkaveisky regretted "that until now Dal had not been bought for a dusty shelf" (he mentions Remizov and Gorodetsky right there), and the Moscow futurist Boris Pasternak at 19In 1414, he wrote three poems inspired by Dahl about “drinking over a bochaga” and sometimes returned to this technique in the future.

The unannounced Dahlian subtexts and sources from Russian poets and writers have yet to be fully revealed. Perhaps it is no coincidence that in Mandelstam's "Poems in Memory of Andrei Bely" the word "gogol" (inspired, in turn, by Gogol's surname) is adjacent to the word "finch" - "gogol" is interpreted by Dahl as "dandy".

17. Dahl's dictionary has become a mythological symbol of Russian cultural identity

This understanding goes back to the era of modernism. In Andrey Bely's symphony "The Cup of Blizzards" one of the phantom characters "grabbed Dal's dictionary and servilely handed it to the golden-bearded mystic", and for Benedikt Livshits "the vast, dense Dal became cozy" in comparison with the primitive elements of futuristic word creation.

Already in the years of the collapse of traditional Russian culture, Osip Mandelstam wrote:

“We don't have an Acropolis. Our culture still wanders and does not find its walls. On the other hand, each word of Dahl's dictionary is a nut of the Acropolis, a small Kremlin, a winged fortress of nominalism, equipped with the Hellenic spirit for a tireless struggle against the formless elements, non-existence, threatening our history from everywhere.

"On the nature of the word"

For the Russian emigration, of course, the "Explanatory Dictionary" was interpreted even more strongly as a "little Kremlin" and salvation from non-existence. Vladimir Nabokov twice recalled, in verse and prose, how, as a student, he stumbled upon Dahl's dictionary at a flea market in Cambridge and eagerly reread it: like in a Russian town - / I found Pushkin and Dahl / on an enchanted tray. “I bought it for half a crown and read it, several pages a night, noting the lovely words and expressions: “oljal” - a booth on barges (now it’s too late, it will never come in handy). The fear of forgetting or clogging up the only thing that I managed to scratch out, however, with rather strong claws, from Russia, has become a direct disease.

Among the emigrants, the sentimental-lubok poem “Russian Culture” by hussar Yevgeny Vadimov (Lisovsky), which lost its authorship, was popular among emigrants, in which Dal became a characteristic series: “Russian culture is the brush of Makovsky, / Marble of Antokolsky, Lermontov and Dal, / Terema and churches , the ringing of the Moscow Kremlin, / Tchaikovsky's music is sweet sadness.

18. Dictionary of Solzhenitsyn: based on extracts from Dalevskiy

In Soviet Russia, the canonization of Dahl, including by writers, only intensified. Although new explanatory dictionaries of the modern literary language appeared in the 20th century - Ushakov, Ozhegov, Bolshoy and Small Academic - the "outdated regional" dictionary still continued to retain the aura of the "main", "real" and "most complete", a monument to "Russia, which we lost. " Patriot writers like Aleksey Yugov accused modern dictionaries of having “thrown out” about a hundred thousand words from the Russian language compared to Dalev’s (forgetting, however, that the vast majority of these words are non-literary dialectisms). The crowning achievement of this tradition was Alexander Solzhenitsyn's Russian Dictionary of Language Expansion, which is an extensive extract of rare words from Dahl that may be useful to a writer (a cautious mark "sometimes you can say" has been introduced). They are supplemented with relatively few words compared to the main Dale mass, taken from Russian writers of the 19th-20th centuries and from some other sources. The very linguistic manner of Solzhenitsyn the writer, especially the late one, — the replacement of foreign words with native and neologisms composed of native roots, a large number of verbal nouns with a zero suffix like “nahlyn” — goes back precisely to Dahl.

19. Soviet censors threw out of the dictionary article

In 1955 Dahl's dictionary was republished in the USSR as a reprint of the second (posthumous) edition of the 1880s. This was one of the first examples of a Soviet reprint (and it was not a reprint, but an extremely laborious complete retype) of an old book in pre-reform orthography, almost forgotten for 37 years, with all the "eras" and "yats". The exclusivity of such an action, in addition to philological accuracy, also indicated a special sacred status given to the dictionary. This reproduction strove to be as accurate as possible - but it was still not quite so. In particular, the number of pages in it does not correspond to the original edition, and most importantly, part of the text was excluded under censorship conditions.

In the first volume, page 541 has a strange appearance - it has much less text than neighboring pages, and at a glance it is clear that the lines are unusually sparse. In the corresponding place, Dahl had the word Yid and its derivatives (in the second posthumous edition - page 557). Probably, initially the dictionary was completely retyped, and then from the finished set nest zhid was thrown out, retyped the page again with an increased interval and without leaving for the Soviet reader such a frank indication of censorship as just a white spot (in addition, from its location it would be it is quite obvious which word was deleted). However, the examples with this word scattered over other entries of the dictionary remained (for example, “Kids write and read vice versa, from right to left” in nest wrap ).

Generally speaking, Dal did not include the names of ethnic groups as such on a general basis: in his dictionary there are neither Englishmen , nor Frenchmen , and actually Jews (there is only Jewish stone ). In those days, ethnonyms were often considered proper names in general, many other authors wrote them with a capital letter. Such vocabulary penetrates Dahl's dictionary only in connection with figurative meanings. Article Tatarin is, but it opens with the definition of a plant (Tatar), and in the nest Rusak the article about the hare occupies about the same amount of space as all the figurative meanings associated with the ethnonym proper. The deleted article Jew was no exception: it begins with the definition of a figurative meaning - "a miser, a miser, a selfish miser", and it contains many proverbs and sayings from which such an image of a Jew arises. They are also found in Dalev's Proverbs of the Russian People. Although if you open, for example, article Rusak , then we learn that Russian mind is “rear mind, belated”, Russian God is “maybe, I suppose yes somehow”, and in article Tatar we read: Tatar eyes - “impudent , shameless rogue."

It is not clear whether the lexicographer himself was an ardent anti-Semite by the standards of that time. Dahl, an Interior Ministry official who dealt particularly with religious movements, is credited with the "Note on Ritual Murders," a compilation of German and Polish texts sympathetically expounding on the blood libel against the Jews. This essay “surfaced” only during the Beilis case in 1913, and his belonging to Dahl has not been proven. Of course, neither the Soviet national policy, nor even the state Soviet anti-Semitism, built on bashful and hypocritical silences, did not allow discussing these plots among the Russian classics in any way. It also played a role in the fact that the word "Jew" since Dahl's time has sharply strengthened the negative connotation that was present at that time, and in Soviet times it became officially taboo. It seemed inconceivable that the treasury of the national spirit, which Lenin highly appreciated, would contain characteristics that have now become “Black Hundred-pogromist” (according to Ushakov’s dictionary). All this led to such an unusual censorship of the dictionary, and then made the “Russian prophet”, whose lines “the Bolsheviks hide from the people”, an icon of anti-Semitic nationalists 1970s–1980s.

20. Modern dictionaries of "criminal jargon" are Dal distorted

A few years ago, linguist Viktor Shapoval, working on Russian slang dictionaries, discovered that in two large dictionaries of Russian criminal jargon, published in the early 1990s, there is a large layer of outlandish words that are not confirmed by any real texts, marked "international" or "foreign". Allegedly, these words are part of a certain international jargon of criminals and are described in departmental dictionaries with the heading "for official use." Among them, for example, the word screen , which supposedly means "night", and the word unit , which means "surveillance".

Shapoval noticed that these words and their interpretations suspiciously coincide with the words from the two extreme - the first and last - volumes of Dahl's dictionary. Moreover, words in which Dahl himself was especially unsure and marked them with a question mark are especially willing to take into "international" words. That is, either Dahl, writing down and taking such dubious words from other sources, did not make a single mistake, and then these words exactly in this form fell into the international slang of criminals, or some quick-witted compiler of a police dictionary "for official use" (perhaps , the criminal himself, who was promised leniency for such work) saw Dahl's dictionary on the shelf, armed himself with two extreme volumes and began to make extracts, paying special attention to outlandish words with questions. Judge for yourself which version is more likely.

An anonymous "departmental" lexicographer arbitrarily interpreted completely innocent words as criminal terms, and also did not firmly understand the old spelling and Dahl's abbreviations. So, the word unit began to mean “surveillance” (in the sense of police surveillance), although Dahl’s context is as follows: “something that looks whole, but incoherent, composite; collection, selection, selection, osprey; sleep, surveillance, sgnetka. Before us is Dahl’s typical attempt to pick up among the original words of synonyms-a replacement for a foreign one, and surveillance (through e) here means “something caked” (a surveillance from the word follow was written through "yat"). The imaginary argotism is completely anecdotal screen - "night"; the plagiarist did not understand Dahl's entry screen, screen, -night , that is, "screen, screen or screen". And this word means not "night", but "chest".

Words written out by someone from Dahl, misunderstood and additionally falsified, went for a walk in the numerous dictionaries of criminal jargon published and republished in our time. Real secret languages ​​​​(Dal, by the way, also dealt with them), in general, are rather poor - they need a cipher for a relatively limited range of concepts, and the public understands the word "dictionary" as a "thick and thorough book", therefore numerous lexicographic phantoms in such publications always in demand.

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Relationship expiration date: what's wrong with the "Love lives for three years" theory

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Author Maria Smirnova

March 21, 2018

There are two opposing views on how long true love can last. Some are sure that it is eternal. Others - that her age is short: only two or three years. Let's see what the science says about this.

In 1997, Frederic Begbeder's novel Love Lives Three Years was published in France. It is based on the well-known theory that people's romantic feelings for each other pass at the moment when the action of the neurotransmitter dopamine, which is also involved in the reward system, weakens. And although by the end of the book the protagonist begins to doubt how viable this hypothesis is, the thesis “Love lives for three years” is surprisingly firmly stuck in the mass consciousness.

There is nothing wrong with trying to explain the nature of human relationships in terms of neuropsychology or behavioral biology: leading scientists around the world are doing this. But in everyday life, the formula proposed by Begbeder is often used in order to find the simplest and most convenient explanation for parting, to justify misbehavior, or never meet anyone at all, so as not to risk it again. In reality, love and affection are formed and maintained through more complex mechanisms.

To begin with, let's figure out where those very three years came from and why, when it comes to lovers, the expression “They developed chemistry” is often heard. Scientists are well aware of what substances are produced by the body when a person has an affair. We are talking about androgens and estrogens, which are responsible for libido, dopamine, norepinephrine and serotonin, which maintain a stable sense of pleasure from communicating with a particular man or woman, as well as vasopressin and oxytocin, which form attachment.

The intensity of their action can really vary under the influence of various factors, including the duration of the relationship. But if the hero of Begbeder was sure that in a few years two people manage to simply get bored with each other, then science relies on a different pattern. Giving us a cocktail of hormones and neurotransmitters, nature hints: she is waiting for us to produce offspring. According to Darwin's theory, the main task of a biological species is not just not to die from hunger or the teeth of a predator, but to pass on genes to the next generations.

It takes an average of 17-18 months for a couple to conceive, bear and give birth to a baby. Add to this lactational amenorrhea - a six-month period of breastfeeding, when the likelihood of becoming pregnant again is very small. Plus, about a year more, during which the child is so dependent that for his survival it is better to have both parents nearby. And the mother, in turn, is especially vulnerable and needs the protection and support of her husband or partner. The cycle of the birth of a new person and his adaptation to an environment filled with viruses and other dangers is more or less stable. And it fits perfectly in just three years.

Only from the moment when the ancestor of modern man took the path of increasing the brain, we have evolved not only physiologically, but also culturally. Nowadays, couples do not always want to get married right away and have offspring. They have a variety of contraceptives at their disposal. Some do not plan to have children at all. So there is nothing surprising in the fact that the mechanisms originally provided by nature for maintaining partnerships for the purpose of procreation now do not work in all cases.

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Ideas about the finitude of love are often based on the fact that sex with the same person gradually becomes boring, sooner or later one of the partners goes to the side and the relationship falls apart as a result. According to the VTsIOM poll, infidelity is the second most common reason for divorce in Russia. But does this mean that love rests only on physical attraction?

Not necessary at all. Scientists from the Canadian Concordia University, together with colleagues from Switzerland and the United States, conducted a study in which it turned out that sexual desire and a feeling of love activate different areas of the brain, although related to each other. The participants in the experiments were asked to look at erotic images and photographs of people who were dear to them. The readings were recorded using a CT scanner.

It turned out that desire activates the area of ​​the striatum (one of the brain structures), which is also involved in the reaction to things that bring pure pleasure: not only to sex, but also, for example, to delicious food. The response to the feeling of love is observed in the zone that is usually associated with the work of the reward system and the formation of addictions. And since addiction can persist in a person for a long time, it is logical to assume that the same applies to love.

Experiments by scientists at the State University of New York at Stony Brook have yielded even more revealing results. The study participants were divided into two groups. The first included people who only recently became a couple with their new lovers. In the second - people who have been married for 10 to 29 years and claim that they still love their husband or wife as much as at the very beginning of the relationship. It turned out that in both of them, when viewing photos of a partner, there is similar activity in the ventral tegmental region - a part of the midbrain that is involved in the reward and pleasure systems. That is, love that lasts for decades really exists.

And the work of "chemistry" does not stop at all after the end of the first stage of the relationship. For example, if you continue to have regular sex and orgasm, oxytocin levels rise, which supports your mutual affection and trust. This occurs in both women and men.

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When we hear about people who have been happily married for a long time, it is often not enough to explain the stability of their relationship that they simply love each other.

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