Russian word breakdown: sounds, parts and grammar

The letters е, ё, ю, я at the start of a word, after a vowel and after ь or ъ stand for two sounds: [й’] plus a vowel. In «ёлка» the ё comes first, so it gives [й’о], and the word sounds [й’о́лка] — five sounds for four letters. In «лёд» the same ё follows a consonant and stands for one sound [о], while also making [л’] soft. The analysis states such a difference in its own line under the table of sounds.

In the cluster «вств» the first consonant drops out: people say [здра́ствуй’т’э]. It is an unpronounced consonant, like т in «честный» or д in «праздник». The letter is written because of related words («здравие»), but it has no sound, so «здравствуйте» has fewer sounds than letters. In the analysis table such a letter gets a dash and the note «silent».

«Подснежник» changes: подснежник-а, подснежник-у. In the dictionary form the ending is not heard, but it exists — a zero ending, drawn as an empty box. «Пальто» never changes: it is the same in every case, there is no changing part, so there is no ending and the whole word is the stem. In the word-parts tab a zero ending is an empty box, and indeclinable words have no box.

On its own it can be either: these are homonyms. «Стекло» (что? — what?) is a neuter noun meaning glass, and «стекло» (что сделало? — what did it do?) is the past tense of «стечь», to flow down. The analysis shows both readings as buttons, the more frequent one first. If you type a sentence («Со стола стекло молоко»), the neighboring words suggest the reading, and the final choice is yours.

The word-parts dictionary consists of word splits from the Russian Wiktionary, written by its contributors, plus a short list of typical school words. Many words are not in it, and then the algorithm splits the word: it finds the ending by comparing the forms of the word (стен-а, стен-ы, стен-е) and takes the prefixes, root and suffixes from parts that occur in dictionary words. Such a result is labeled «Analyzed automatically», its boundaries are drawn dashed, and it is worth checking against a textbook. If the root is unknown to the dictionary or the stem can be split in more than one way, the tool does not guess: it shows only the stem and the ending.

Current Russian textbooks call -ть in the infinitive an inflectional suffix that is not part of the stem: the stem of «читать» is «чита». Older textbooks called -ть an ending. The tool uses the inflectional suffix by default, and the «How to write it» settings let you pick the convention of your textbook; they also decide whether the postfix -ся belongs to the stem.