The Lexicography of New Russian Words with the Semantics of Cooperation and Discord

New words are the first to signal a cultural change; they express emerging understanding of the new social reality. Vocabulary fluctuates in response to the changing reality. In the last 20–30 years, the forms of communication in Russia and the world have undergone dramatic transformations, which, in their turn, have led to the renewal of the vocabulary. The sheer number of new words entering the Russian language require significant time and effort on the part of lexicographers who hunt down these words and describe them. Russian lexicographers have extensive experience in creating new dictionaries to encompass larger numbers of new words. As a rule, lexicographers of new words select the material according to the temporal rather than thematic criterion. In our view, however, a more productive approach would be to focus on the new forms of social interaction reflected in the language, since this vocabulary has not been systemically analyzed yet. Searching for methods of defining the new words as accurately as possible, scholars need to share their experience of structuring dictionary entries. In this article, we are going to describe our own experience of compiling a dictionary and of dealing with the questions we faced in the course of our work. The fact that most new words exist in the liminal area between language and speech complicates the process of their lexicographic description and research. In this paper, we are going to focus on the key aspects of structuring a word entry: the choice of the headword, formulation of its definition, the use of labels, and the principles of selecting examples to illustrate how the word with this or that meaning is used. It is particularly important to capture these words because their life span has decreased significantly as words come into fashion fast and just as fast go out of fashion, stop being used and are replaced by others.