Phraseological unit bit’ chelom and its derivatives in Russian: To the historical and temporal characteristic of use

One of the challenges of modern linguistic science consists of describing the modern Russian language lexis, reflecting the history of the functioning of each unit included in the vocabulary, with a commentary for a full-fledged understanding by a native speaker. One of the perspective ways of studying the vocabulary is the creation of lexicographic portraits of lexical and phraseological units, in which the history of their functioning in the language is traced on the basis of data from dictionaries of various types with the involvement of a linguistic and non-linguistic information from various sources, reflecting certain features of the a word or expression use in speech. The article traces the history of the phraseological unit bit’ chelom and its lexical and syntactic derivatives (chelobitie, chelobitnaya, etc.) in the Russian language. The process of their transition from the active vocabulary to the category of passive units is shown. The main reason for this, according to the authors’ opinion, was the exclusion of the unit itself and its derivatives from the terminological system of office work due to Peter the Great’s reforms of the state administration system. During the 19–20^th centuries the studied lexis is defined, according to dictionaries, as passive vocabulary. On the other hand, it is used in oral and written speech of that period and is perceived by modern Russian speakers as well known too. Observations that indicate the relevance of many words and expressions in living speech, which in modern explanatory dictionaries are classified as passive vocabulary and phraseology, give grounds for correcting the lexicographic description of such units in scientific publications and dictionaries, focused on the “wide" user.