Etymology

Lenin

L1E1N1I1N1

Today it means: Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, a Russian revolutionary and politician. Full definition →

Russian Ле́нин
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The story

  1. Russian · derived fromЛе́нин
  2. English todayLenin

Transliteration of Russian Ле́нин (Lénin), probably due to the use of a passport of a friend, Nikolay Lenin, whose surname originated from the Siberian Lena river. It is commonly believed that the Lena derives its name from the original Even-Evenk name Elyu-Ene, which means "the Large River". By surface analysis, Lena + -in, "the man from the Lena". Another street name of a fellow Old Bolshevik conspirator, Stalin (“the man of steel”), is comparable as an alias based on an alleged attribute; and Bukharin is morphologically comparable as "a person from said place" (Bukhara + -in) but was Nikolai Bukharin's real surname rather than a street name.

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.