Sergey Ivanovich Ozhegov was a Russia

Russia

Russia or , officially known as both Russia and the Russian Federation , is a country in northern Eurasia. It is a federal semi-presidential republic, comprising 83 federal subjects...

n lexicographer

Lexicography

Lexicography is divided into two related disciplines:*Practical lexicography is the art or craft of compiling, writing and editing dictionaries....

 who in 1926 graduated from the Leningrad University where his teachers included Lev Shcherba

Lev Shcherba

Lev Shcherba was a Russian linguist and lexicographer specializing in phonetics and phonology....

 and Viktor Vinogradov

Viktor Vinogradov

Viktor Vladimirovich Vinogradov was a Soviet linguist and philologist who presided over Soviet linguistics after World War II.Vinogradov's teachers at the Petrograd Institute of History and Philology included Lev Shcherba and Aleksey Shakhmatov, but it was Charles Bally's ideas that influenced him...

.

In 1935–1940, Ozhegov contributed to Dmitry Ushakov

Dmitry Ushakov

Dmitry Nikolayevich Ushakov was a Russian philologist and lexicographer.He was the creator and chief editor of the 4-volume Explanatory Dictionary of the Russian Language with over 90,000 entries. He was also the creator of an orthographic dictionary of the Russian language .Ushakov died in...

's four-volume explanatory dictionary of the Russian language. His main piece of work, the Dictionary and Culture of Russian Speech (""), as updated and corrected by Natalia Shvedova

Natalia Shvedova

Natalia Yulievna Shvedova was a Russian lexicographer who authored several standard outlines of Russian grammar, for which she was awarded the USSR State Prize in 1982....

, is the most widely used reference

Reference

Reference is derived from Middle English referren, from Middle French rèférer, from Latin referre, "to carry back", formed from the prefix re- and ferre, "to bear"...

 for the Russian language

Russian language

Russian is a Slavic language used primarily in Russia, Belarus, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan. It is an unofficial but widely spoken language in Ukraine, Moldova, Latvia, Turkmenistan and Estonia and, to a lesser extent, the other countries that were once constituent republics...

 today.

Ozhegov also ran the Russian Language Institute

Russian Language Institute

The V.V. Vinogradov Russian Language Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences is the language regulator of the Russian language. It is based in Moscow and it is part of the Russian Academy of Sciences.It was founded in 1944.-See also:* The V.V...

 as part of the Russian Academy of Sciences

Russian Academy of Sciences

The Russian Academy of Sciences consists of the national academy of Russia and a network of scientific research institutes from across the Russian Federation as well as auxiliary scientific and social units like libraries, publishers and hospitals....

 to oversee and advise on the correct spelling, grammar and pronunciation of the Russian language. His work was widely recognized in the Soviet Union

Soviet Union

The Soviet Union , officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics , was a constitutionally socialist state that existed in Eurasia between 1922 and 1991....

 and he was accorded burial at the Novodevichy Cemetery

Novodevichy Cemetery

Novodevichy Cemetery is the most famous cemetery in Moscow, Russia. It is next to the 16th-century Novodevichy Convent, which is the city's third most popular tourist site. It should not be confused with the Novodevichy Cemetery in Saint Petersburg....

.

Ozhegov was not without his detractors, especially among Russian émigrés. Vladimir Nabokov

Vladimir Nabokov

Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov was a multilingual Russian novelist and short story writer. Nabokov wrote his first nine novels in Russian, then rose to international prominence as a master English prose stylist...

, for instance, compared his dictionary with that of Vladimir Dahl unfavorably and, in his novel Ada or Ardor, even called it "moronic".

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