Shakhmatov’s legacy in modern academic lexicography (the draft Dictionary of New Words of the Early XX Century)

The Great Dictionary Card Index stored at the Institute for Linguistic Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences in Saint Petersburg remains a signifi cant legacy of A. A. Shakhmatov for Russian lexicography. Under his editorship of the academic Dictionary of the Russian Language this card index began to be replenished from sources of various types. The following academic dictionary preserved Shakhmatov’s traditions in lexicography until 1937, and in the 1930s the card index was replenished with two million cards with quotations from newspapers and magazines, various reference books, and publications from the period of socialism construction, thereby becoming a unique comprehensive source of new words dating to the 1920s and 1930s. Thus, this card index, along with contemporary digital sources of newspater vocabulary of the early XX century, is naturally seen as the basis for creating the Dictionary of New Words of the Early XX Century. The article examines the family of words containing the auto- component meaning “automobile or related to automobilies” in order to showcase potential quantitative and qualitative advantages of such lexicographic collections over existing lexicographic publications describing this period, which indicates the importance of the project on drafting the new dictionary for the history of the Russian language and the study of its vocabulary.