Ozhegov, Sergei

Born Sept. 9 (22), 1900, in the settlement of Kamennoe, formerly Tver’ Province; died Dec. 15, 1964, in Moscow. Soviet linguist and lexicographer.

Ozhegov graduated from Leningrad University in 1926. He was a student of V. V. Vinogradov and L. V. Shcherba. In 1952 he became head of the Section on Cultured Speech of the Institute of the Russian Language of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR. Ozhegov was one of the compilers of the Explanatory Dictionary of the Russian Language, edited by D. N. Ushakov (vols. 1935–40). He compiled and edited the one-volume Dictionary of the Russian Language (1949; 9th ed., 1972).

Ozhegov’s major works deal with Russian lexicology and lexicography, the history of the Russian literary language, sociolinguistics, cultured Russian speech, and the language of various authors (P. A. Plavil’shchikov, I. A. Krylov, A. N. Ostrovskii). He edited the Orthographic Dictionary of the Russian Language (1956; 5th ed., 1963) and the reference works Russian Literary Pronunciation and Stress (1955) and Proper Russian Usage (1962). Ozhegov was the founder and editor in chief of the collections Voprosy kul’tury rechi (Problems of Cultured Speech; issues 1–6, 1955–65).