The idea of a comprehensive “Russisch-Deutsches Wörterbuch” (RDW) (Russian‑German Dictionary)

and the first conceptual sketches trace back to the late Professor of Slavic Linguistics Herbert Bräuer (d. 1989), who, as a member of the Mainz Academy, previously oversaw the “Russische Geographische Namenbuch” (Russian Geographical Names Dictionary).

The Russian‑German Dictionary presents the general vocabulary of contemporary Russian in a uniquely comprehensive manner. It contains numerous keywords and meanings that are not listed in any of the Russian-German general dictionaries published until then, amounting to roughly 250,000 lemmata across 14 volumes. As a predominantly passive dictionary for German-speaking users, the RDW covers both standard contemporary vocabulary and non-standard vocabulary that is necessary for understanding Russian literature and journalism from the 19th century to the present day in the original language. It contains obsolete and outdated lexemes as well as neologisms from the last two decades. A selection of regionally specific lexemes and words and meanings from substandard language, including jargon and vulgarisms, are included. Specialist terminology relevant to everyday communication is included to a large extent.

The Russian-German Dictionary unifies, within a single work, the various types of Russian lexical units traditionally covered by separate monolingual specialist dictionaries, e.g. phraseological units, proverbs, idioms, abbreviations, foreign words and, where appropriate, proper names. Entries provide part‑of‑speech classification, word stress, morphological forms and variants, pronunciation features, as well as usage markers, references to syntactic compatibility of keywords, and affiliation to certain semantic fields (word‑formation categories). Where relevant, equivalence relations are illustrated with Russian free word groups and their German counterparts. Staff from the Institute for Linguistic Research at the Russian Academy of Sciences (St. Petersburg) were also involved in the editorial work on the word entries.

As a large‑scale dictionary with a finely differentiated micro‑structure, the RDW is aimed at the needs of advanced and professional users. At the same time, the RDW is a standard work that can provide a solid basis for further lexicographical work in various fields and with different objectives (e.g. school dictionaries) in the German-speaking world.