Modern political term as a potential entry of a common language dictionary

The problem of reflecting modern political vocabulary in a common language dictionary is considered on the example of the term actor. This term meaning subject of politics was put into use in Russia in the early 1990s. This interpretation of the term was reflected and developed in scientific works, textbooks and political dictionaries. At present, an actor is viewed in political science as the most accurate designation of a participant in a political process that can actively influence the course of its development. The scientific significance of the term determined its general actualization, which was expressed by the increase of its usage frequency outside specialized texts. This is clearly demonstrated in the materials of the Russian National Corpus. The analysis of these materials shows that in these texts the meaning of the term actor is generally adequate to its understanding in political science. The word often appears in combination with adjectives of different semantics, mainly determining the degree of political actor significance. The use of this term in emotionally colored contexts is a sign of its absorption by general language. At the same time, the word is still outside the modern dictionaries of the Russian language, including the explanatory ones. In this paper, we propose a variant of describing the word actor as a political term in a large volume explanatory dictionary. The dictionary entry contains accentological information about the word, brief grammatical information, stylistic marker (label Polit.), interpretation and examples of usage.