ON THE HISTORY OF THE WORD PROKHINDEY AND ITS LEXICAL VARIANTS

The article examines the etymology, the ways of development and mainly the history of the word prokhindey and discusses the variants of its use, namely, the form prikhindey, which is not fixed and not marked in any way in lexicographic publications. The fate and social path of this word against the background of its more well-known, dictionary-registered variant is traced through diachronic analysis and comparison of various sources, oral and written: author’s handwritten texts, paper editions of canonical texts, electronic collections of texts, including data from the National Corpus of the Russian Language. The realized derivational potential of each variant is also being studied. Based on the analyzed material, it is assumed that historically, the version prikhindey developed in parallel with the form of the initial pro- and is peculiar not only to oral speech; in written texts from the beginning of the twentieth century and at least until the early 1960s, the word itself and its derivatives are registered in art publications and memoir literature quite regularly in comparison with the competitive version. The article shows examples of how this variant was later outshone by the prokhindey variant due to the tendency to artificially replace it in writing with the form prokhindey, which received the advantages of a lexicographically fixed one.