Glossary of Russian abbreviations and acronyms

Washington: US Government Printing Office, 1967. — 818 p.Thousands of abbreviations and acronyms have been introduced in the Soviet Union since I917-some spontaneously created, others officially established. While some disappeared with the short-lived institutions or concepts they represented, vast numbers of them took root and gained general acceptance, even becoming full-fledged words in the Russian language. In most of the dictionaries and glossaries of Russian abbreviations published outside the Soviet Union, abbreviations and acronyms of different periods and varying importance were collected, often freely intermixed with trademarks. In contrast to this approach, the Словарь сокращений русского языка, Государственное издательство иностранных и национальных словарей (Moscow, 1963), which has provided nearly half of the material included in the present glossary, shows careful and discriminating selection. The 23600 entries in this publication represent a selection from 40000 abbreviations and acronyms in the files of the Lexicography and Terminology Section, Aerospace Technology Division. The compilers and editors of the glossary have attempted to restrict its contents to: Abbreviated words in general use by twentieth-century Russian authors, scientists, journalists, teachers, editors, librarians, and archivists, i.e., people professionally concerned with the printed word and its dissemination; Acronyms used in Soviet publications since World War II, with an emphasis on those found in scientific and technical literature pertinent to aerospace. Russian semiabbreviated compound terms, like Автозавод, Мотовоз, Политэкономия, created by the addition of such meaningful prefixes as Авто -, Мото -, Полит- to whole words, have been excluded from the glossary. The same is true of words initially created as abbreviations which through the years have become established in the Russian language, even making their way into the vocabularies of other languages, as, for example, Колхоз and Совхоз.