The Russian alphabet: all 33 Cyrillic letters and how to read them

The Russian alphabet has 33 letters, and with a little practice each day you can expect to read them, slowly, within a week or two. The trick is to sort them into groups: letters you already know, letters that look familiar but lie, and letters that are new. This guide gives you all 33 with their Russian names, the two signs that have no sound of their own, and the words to practise on. To see where you stand afterwards, take our free Russian level test.

Updated November 11, 2026 · 6 min read

Where Cyrillic comes from

Russian is written in the Cyrillic script. The Unicode Standard describes Cyrillic as one of several scripts ultimately derived from Greek, traditionally used for Slavic languages, among which Russian is predominant. Its earliest surviving examples are Old Church Slavonic manuscripts from the 10th century CE. A second early Slavic script, Glagolitic, looks very different and is treated as a separate script.

Cyrillic is written from left to right, with capital and small letters and spaces between words, just like English. That removes two difficulties at once: you only have to learn new shapes, not a new direction or a new way of joining letters. If you also want Ukrainian or Serbian later, much of this alphabet carries over; our guide to Serbian's two alphabets shows which letters differ.

All 33 letters

The order and the letter names below come from Wiktionary's Russian letter lists, which number Ё as the 7th letter and Я as the 33rd. The sounds are our rough guide for English speakers, not a phonetic description.

Three groups make it easier

• Old friends: А, К, М, О, Т look and sound much like their Latin twins. Read мама (mom) and you have already used two of them.
• False friends: В, Е, Н, Р, С, У, Х look Latin but say something else. These cause most beginners' mistakes; see the next table.
• New shapes: Б, Г, Д, Ж, З, И, Й, Л, П, Ф, Ц, Ч, Ш, Щ, Ы, Э, Ю, Я and the two signs. Learn them a few a day, always inside a word.

False friends: letters that look Latin

Every example word was checked on Wiktionary. Say each one aloud, reading the Cyrillic letter for its real sound.

The hard sign and the soft sign

Two letters never make a sound. The soft sign ь makes the consonant before it soft (palatalised), roughly as if a faint y followed it. It also works as a separator: in льют (they pour) the vowel after it is pronounced separately, with a y-sound, unlike лют.

The hard sign ъ keeps the consonant before it hard and separates it from the next vowel, as in съезд (congress). It is rare today. Wiktionary notes that before the 1918 spelling reform it was written after almost every final consonant, so old books are full of it. The Unicode Standard adds that before 1917 Russian also used three letters it has since dropped: yat, fita and izhitsa.

Ё and the missing dots

Ё is a full letter, the 7th, but Wiktionary lists Е as an alternative way of writing it. In practice you will meet ёж (hedgehog) and ёлка (spruce, New Year's tree) printed with or without the dots. When a word looks unfamiliar, try reading an Е as Ё.

First words to read

Each word was checked on Wiktionary. The accent marks the stressed vowel, as Wiktionary does; learn every word with its stress. The readings are approximate, in the spirit of Wiktionary's transliteration.

A two-week plan

Our suggestion, about 15 minutes a day. Days 1–3: the old friends and the false friends, through short words such as мама, дом, нос and сок. Days 4–8: the new shapes, four or five a day, each in a word from the table above. Days 9–11: Ь, Ъ, Й and Ё. Days 12–14: read slowly, aloud, and write by hand. Then move from letters to vocabulary: 16Word drills the commonest words with spaced repetition, with a Blocks break between answers, and our plans start free.

Keep learning

• Free Russian level test, or all 36 level tests
• Other Cyrillic languages: Ukrainian and Serbian level tests, and the Ukrainian citizenship language exam
• Cyrillic's parent script: the Greek level test and the Greek Certificate of Attainment
• More scripts: the Georgian alphabet, the Hebrew alphabet, the Arabic alphabet and Devanagari for Hindi
• All guides