The issues of religious terms’ description in Russian explanatory dictionaries

The article raises the issue of religious terms being introduced and defined in academic explanatory dictionaries of the 20th and 21st centuries. Words of religious discourse are insufficiently represented in explanatory dictionaries, and they are often labelled “according to religious beliefs”. “The Russian Dictionary of the 21st century”, being created at the Herzen State Pedagogical University of Russia in Saint-Petersburg, includes plenty of religious terms with derivatives that all receive their own definition and illustrations, both free from ideological component. This dictionary also shows the difference between religious meanings and neutral ones, the shift of semantic accents in religious meanings, the difference in the meanings of the same word in different religions and confessions.