On October 17, an envelope with a commemorative stamp dedicated to the 125th Birth Anniversary of Sergey Ozhegov, a linguist and lexicographer, was put into postal circulation

Sergei Ozhegov (1900–1964) was a Soviet linguist, lexicographer, Doctor of Philology, and professor. He was the author of the Dictionary of the Russian Language, which has gone through many editions, and one of the compilers of the Explanatory Dictionary of the Russian Language, edited by D. Ushakov (1935–1940).

He was born on September 9 (22), 1900, in the village of Kamennoe (presently, the town of Kuvshinovo) in the Tver Province. On the eve of World War I, the family moved to St. Petersburg, where S. Ozhegov graduated from gymnasium. Later, he entered the philology department of Petrograd University.

In 1922, he completed his military service at the headquarters of the Kharkov Military District and immediately began studying at the Faculty of Linguistics and Material Culture of Petrograd University. In 1926, he graduated from Leningrad University and in 1929, he completed postgraduate studies at the Institute of Comparative History of Western and Eastern Literatures and Languages. In 1936, S. Ozhegov moved to Moscow. From 1937, he gave classes at Moscow universities (Chernyshevsky Moscow Institute of Philosophy, Literature and History and Moscow State Pedagogical Institute). From 1939, he was a research fellow at the Institute of Language and Writing, and then, at the Institute of Linguistics of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR.

During the Great Patriotic War, S. Ozhegov stayed to teach in Moscow. In the 1940s and 1950s, he conducted research in the fields of Russian lexicology and lexicography, the history of the Russian literary language, sociolinguistics, Russian speech culture, the language of individual writers, and others. S. Ozhegov was the founder and the first Head of the Sector of Speech Culture at the Institute of the Russian Language of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR (since 1952). He was the Editor of the Orthographic Dictionary of the Russian Language, and reference dictionaries Russian Literary Pronunciation and Stress, and Correctness of Russian Speech.

S. Ozhegov was the founder and the Editor-in-Chief of Issues of Speech Culture collections. On the initiative of S. Ozhegov, a Russian Language Reference Service was established in 1958 at the Institute of Russian Language, which responds to inquiries from organizations and individuals regarding the correctness of Russian speech.

The commemorative stamp provides a portrait of S. Ozhegov against the backdrop of an inkwell and a book; the main image features S. Ozhegov at his desk.

In addition to the issue of the envelope with a commemorative stamp, JSC Marka produced special cancels for Moscow and Tver.


Design Artist: V Khablovsky.
Quantity: 500 thousand envelopes.

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