Introduction On 17 January 2008, Russians for the first time selected the word and the antiword of the year. Over 3, 000 participants in an email poll by Dar Slova (The Gift of Words) made a list of the 50 most used words in 2007. The judges included specialists from the Centre for Russian Language Development under the auspices of the Association of Russian Language and Literature Teachers - novelists, poets, linguists, literary critics, ethnographers and philosophers. From the words nominated, these judges were to choose the one most characteristic of 2007. As a result of voting, the word ‘glamour’, which relatively recently appeared in the Russian language, won a landslide victory (35 points) 1. © 2010 Arja Rosenholm, Kaarle Nordenstreng and Elena Trubina for selection and editorial matter; individual contributions the contributors.