Free online translator for converting English names to Russian (Русский)
Russian uses the Cyrillic alphabet, which has 33 letters. While some letters look like Latin letters, they often represent different sounds. Russian is a phonetic language where spelling closely matches pronunciation.
Russian Cyrillic has thirty-three letters, and its usefulness for foreign names comes from covering several sounds with single characters that need digraphs in English. Ш is sh, Ч is ch, Ж is the zh of measure, Щ is a longer shch, and Ц is ts. A name like Charlotte compresses neatly to Шарлотта. Working the other way, Cyrillic has no single letter for the English th or w, so those are where transliteration loses information.
The alphabet descends from the ninth-century work of Cyril and Methodius, adapted from Greek uncials to write Old Church Slavonic, and was cut down sharply by Peter the Great in 1708 and again by the 1918 reform, which removed several redundant letters. What remains is a compact and highly regular system: Russian spelling is far more phonetic than English, so a Russian reader given a transliterated name will pronounce it consistently, which is not true of Arabic or Hebrew.
Two letters carry no sound of their own. The soft sign ь palatalises the preceding consonant and the hard sign ъ blocks that palatalisation. They rarely appear in transliterated foreign names but are common in Russian ones, and their presence is often the clue that a name is genuinely Russian rather than a foreign name written in Cyrillic.
Transliterating English names to Russian Cyrillic follows established phonetic rules. The Russian alphabet has letters for most English sounds, making transliteration relatively straightforward.
The English h is the classic difficulty. Russian has no h, and there are two competing traditions for handling it. The older convention substitutes г, which is why Hamlet is Гамлет and Heine is Гейне; the modern convention uses х, giving Гарри or Харри for Harry depending on which tradition a translator follows. Both appear in print and neither is considered an error.
W is written в, merging it with v, so Watson becomes Ватсон or Уотсон depending on whether the transliterator prioritises spelling or sound. Th collapses to т or с. In the other direction, Russian names carry grammatical gender in their endings — Ivanov and Ivanova, Petrov and Petrova — so a surname changes form for a woman. This is not optional and is a frequent source of confusion in documents that assume a single fixed surname per family.
Here are examples of common English names transliterated to Russian:
Explore your name in other writing systems:
Use our Cyrillic translator above. Simply type your name in English, and it converts to Russian Cyrillic using standard transliteration rules. The result matches how your name would appear on Russian documents.
Some Cyrillic letters look like Latin letters but represent different sounds. For example, 'P' in Cyrillic is pronounced like 'R', and 'H' in Cyrillic sounds like 'N'. This is why names need proper transliteration.
Yes, our tool follows GOST 7.79-2000, the standard Russian transliteration system. This is what you'd see on visas, passports, and official documents in Russia.
Yes! This transliteration follows official standards used for Russian visa and passport documentation. However, always verify with official sources for legal documents.
Russian naming conventions are different - Russians use a patronymic (father's name + suffix) as their middle name. Foreign names don't get patronymics, just transliterated as-is.
Russian has no h sound. An older tradition uses г (Гамлет for Hamlet), a newer one uses х. Both appear in published Russian and neither is considered wrong.
Russian surnames are grammatically gendered: Ivanov becomes Ivanova, Petrov becomes Petrova. It is a required feature of the language, not a variant spelling.
Neither has a sound. The soft sign ь palatalises the preceding consonant; the hard sign ъ blocks palatalisation. They appear mostly in genuinely Russian names rather than transliterated foreign ones.
Yes — Cyrillic is the alphabet and Russian is the language that uses it, so the spelling above is your name in Cyrillic letters as Russian writes it. Other Cyrillic languages spell foreign names a little differently: Ukrainian uses і where Russian has и, and Bulgarian and Serbian have their own habits. If you want the Ukrainian form, use the Ukrainian page.