Composition of the word family with the root *

The article is devoted to the comparative analysis of the word family with the root -свят/свящ- based on historical dictionaries of the Russian language, the purpose of the study is to conduct a preliminary analysis of the presentation of the words of this family in different dictionaries of the Russian language, namely, historical and modern. The statistical approach to lexical data demonstrates that the data obtained from five historical dictionaries contain a large number of words that no longer function in the modern Russian language, compared to certain dictionaries of modern Russian. I.I. Sreznevsky's Dictionary includes 105 words; Dictionary of Old Russian Language (11th–14th centuries) has 73 words; Russian Dictionary XI-XVII Centuries involves 210 words; Dictionary of the Russian Academy includes 61 words; Dictionary of the Church Slavonic language of 1847 has 150 words; Explanatory Dictionary of the Russian Language by Vladimir Dahl involves 124 words. When comparing quantitative data in all the historical dictionaries, the largest group comprises lexemes with the secondary root -свящ-. Moreover, all the words of this word family are not only etymologically related, but have the same root, since they maintain unity in their seme content that allows to analyze the semantic density of the root. In addition, a homogeneous stylistic marking of words of the word family also confirms their affinity, as all the words of this word family are genetically related to Church Slavonic and belong to the religious sphere. Graphs of the use of the words святой, святость (saint, sanctity) and свящeнный (holy) based on the Russian National Corpus demonstrate a decrease in the frequency of these words since the middle of the 19th century, and a comparison of the list of words of this word family from each historical dictionary with the modern linguistic consciousness directly indicates a drastic reduction in quantitative content of this word family, that occurred due to extralinguistic (historical and ideological) reasons