Type лютого and You’ll Get “a Lutheran” ── How to Use a Ukrainian Dictionary

Type лютого (“of February”) into the online edition of the 20-volume Dictionary of the Ukrainian Language, published by the Ukrainian Lingua-Information Fund of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, and what comes up is the headword ЛЮ́ТОР. That’s a colloquial term for лютер (a Lutheran) — nothing to do with February.

The dictionary isn’t at fault. Ukrainian dictionaries list words under their “base form” as headwords. February is лю́тий, and лютого is an inflected form of it. The online edition does not convert an inflected form back into its headword form for you. A word it cannot find lands on some other headword with a similar spelling.

Here we set out, using the dictionary screens as they stood on September 24, 2026: the steps for getting from an inflected form back to a headword, how to read the abbreviations and stress (accent) marks that sit beside a headword, and how to use the free online dictionaries that public institutions publish.

Headwords Stand in Their “Base Form”

Line up the headwords of the 20-volume dictionary, and you can see that each part of speech has a fixed form it stands in. Right after the headword come the word-ending clue for how it inflects, and an abbreviation for its part of speech and gender.

The “тня” in the headword line is an abbreviation showing a replacement for the end of the headword кві́тень. The genitive of кві́тень is кві́тня, where the е that was in the headword has dropped out. That is why, when you look at an inflected form, it pays to suspect that a vowel somewhere has disappeared.

Getting Back from an Inflected Form to the Headword

Out in the world, what you run into is usually an inflected form. The table below gives examples of forms you’re likely to run into, what form they are, and which headword to look up. Each can be confirmed from the dictionary’s inflection tables or headword lines.

Following these steps in order cuts down on guesswork:

• Guess the part of speech from the ending. An ending in -ого or -ому suggests an adjective-type inflection; a verb that doesn’t end in -ти suggests a personal or past-tense form, and so on.
• Form the headword and look it up. For a noun, form the singular nominative; for an adjective, the masculine nominative; for a verb, the -ти infinitive. Also consider whether a vowel has dropped out.
• Check against the ending shown on the headword line. With кві́тень, тня, you can confirm that the genitive comes out as квітня.
• Search the inflection tables for the exact form you encountered. “Словники України online” lays out every inflected form of a headword you select, as a table.

Typed As Is, It Lands on a Different Word

Both online dictionaries match whatever string you type against their alphabetically ordered list of headwords. When tested on September 24, 2026, neither reached the intended headword when the inflected form was typed as is; here is what came up instead.

Just as looking up січня brings up a river’s name, an inflected form can happen to share its spelling with the headword for an entirely different word. Always read the entry that comes up to check whether its definition fits your context.

On “Словники України online,” the apostrophe character also needs attention. Typing п’ять with the half-width keyboard apostrophe (“‘”) brought up the inflection table for the numeral п’ять, but typing it with the apostrophe used in the orthography guides (“’”, the same character as the closing quotation mark) landed on the headword for the Italian city П’яченца (Piacenza).

Reading the Stress Mark

In the 20-volume edition, headwords carry a mark (´) over the stressed vowel. In Ukrainian, the same spelling can be a different word depending on where the stress falls. The 20-volume dictionary lists ПІ́ТИ and ПІТИ́ side by side: ПІ́ТИ is an old or dialectal way of saying “to sing,” while ПІТИ́ means “to go.”

Headwords with the same spelling but different meanings are numbered. лю́тий is split into ЛЮ́ТИЙ 1 (fierce, harsh) and ЛЮ́ТИЙ 2 (February). When a headword is numbered like this, open every entry and compare the definitions and usage examples.

Stress can shift position depending on the inflected form. In the inflection tables of “Словники України online,” the stressed syllable differs by form — for example, the genitive of пішни́к is пішника́, and the accusative of середа́ is се́реду. A headword’s stress mark alone does not tell you how every form of the word is read. The inflection tables mark stress on every form.

The position of stress is also used to determine spelling. The 2019 orthography’s very first article states that unstressed е and и are unclear in pronunciation, so for words whose stress does not shift, one should check a dictionary (we introduce this in the article Ukrainian Greetings and Thank-Yous).

Online Dictionaries Published by Public Institutions

The Ukrainian Lingua-Information Fund (Український мовно-інформаційний фонд) of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine publishes the following dictionaries free of charge.

According to the explanation on the online edition of the 20-volume dictionary, this dictionary is part of the fund’s “national dictionary foundation,” one of the academic assets designated a “national treasure” (національне надбання) by Cabinet Order No. 73-r of February 11, 2004. Because the online edition does not yet cover volumes for letters from С onward, the definitions of words such as січень (January), травень (May), and червень (June) cannot, as of September 2026, be read on this site. Even for such words, though, “Словники України online” lets you check the inflection table and the stress.

Before the 20-volume dictionary, there was the earlier academic dictionary, the 11-volume Словник української мови, published from 1970 to 1980. IEU’s entry “Lexicography” introduces it as “the largest Ukrainian dictionary” of its day. For word origins, there is the same Academy’s Institute of Linguistics’s Etymological Dictionary of the Ukrainian Language (planned as seven volumes in all, with six published between 1982 and 2012).

The spelling used today follows the 2019 orthography. The online edition of the 20-volume dictionary, for example, lists “project” as проєкт; searching under проект lands on a different word. Changes to spelling are covered in The 2019 Orthography Became the “State Language Standard” Seven Years Later. Dictionaries published before 2019 follow the orthography that came before it.

Ukrainian Dictionaries Published in Japanese

Bibliographic data from Japan’s National Diet Library shows the following Japanese-Ukrainian dictionaries and word lists, as of September 2026. This article does not evaluate their content.

• 『ウクライナ語辞典』 (“Ukrainian Dictionary”), edited by the Eurasia Center, supervised by Oleksandr Serhiiovych Bielikov, Best Publishing, November 2012, 1076 pages (with an audio disc)
• 『ウクライナ語基礎1500語』 (“1,500 Basic Ukrainian Words”) by Ryunosuke Kuroda, Daigaku Shorin, September 1995, 177 pages
• 『日本語-ウクライナ語・ウクライナ語-日本語単語集』 (“Japanese-Ukrainian, Ukrainian-Japanese Word List”), edited by Shokichi Abe and others, Kokusai Gogakusha, February 2007, 399 pages
• I. Bondarenko and Takao Hino, Українсько-японський, японсько-український словник, Al’ternatyvy, 1998, 585 pages
• I. Bondarenko and Takao Hino, 『和烏小辞典 日本語・ウクライナ語小辞典』 (“Concise Japanese-Ukrainian Dictionary”), Astroprynt, 2001, 307 pages

All of these predate the 2019 orthography. If you’re unsure of spelling, check the current spelling in the online dictionaries above. Textbooks used in courses at Japanese universities are introduced in Ukrainian Courses and Classes at Tokyo University of Foreign Studies, Osaka University, and the University of Tokyo.