Russian Team Names

A list of 99 Russian words to use as team and group names, chosen by Wheel of Teams on 2026-10-04 and filed in four groups: Animals (25), Weather and nature (28), Strength and sport (24), Friends and fun (22). They are words of the Russian language, not the names of Russian clubs or national sides. Each one was looked up that day in its own entry, in the Russian section, of the English Wiktionary (https://en.wiktionary.org/). The name is printed in Latin letters as that entry transliterates the word, without the stress mark and with the first letter raised (š, ž and č stand for ш, ж and ч), and the Cyrillic spelling follows in brackets as the entry is titled. A word whose transliteration has j, c, x or the soft sign mark was left out. The line under each name gives the meaning the entry gives, in our own words; Wiktionary text is under CC BY-SA 4.0. A word with no entry was left out, and so was a word whose entry has a sense labelled vulgar or derogatory. Every name was searched as a title on English Wikipedia, in Cyrillic and in Latin letters, and was dropped when the page of that title is, or leads to, a company, a product, a film, a book, a song, a music group, a team or a person. A title that is only a disambiguation page, a place, a page about the animal, plant, thing or idea the word names, or a page about a different word with the same spelling was no reason to drop a name. One-word names were also searched as book titles on Open Library (https://openlibrary.org/), in Latin letters: four words that are the title of a play, a novel or a book in nine or more editions were dropped. Compared with Wikipedia's lists of national football team nicknames (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lists_of_national_association_football_teams_by_nickname and the seven lists it links): one word that is part of a nickname on them was dropped. Compared by script the same day with every other list on this site: no name is repeated. Nothing was checked against a trademark register. Licence: own work