Zodiac Signs in Russian: All 12 Names & Meanings

Russian did to the zodiac signs in Russian what German did to the German ones: translated the lot. Only one of the twelve is a recognisable loanword. The other eleven are ordinary Russian words — a ram, a bull, a crab, a lion, scales — built from Slavic roots, and none of them looks remotely like its English equivalent.

Two things then make Russian harder than German. Stress is unpredictable and unmarked in normal writing, and it moves. And Russian nouns decline through six cases, so the form you memorise is not the form you will read in a horoscope headline.

All 12 Zodiac Signs in Russian

Stress is marked below with an acute accent. Russian does not print these marks — they appear in dictionaries and textbooks only — but getting the stress wrong is the fastest way to be misunderstood.

Note that stress sits on the final syllable in five of the twelve — Овен, Телец, Близнецы, Весы, Стрелец — which is unusual enough that English speakers reliably get them wrong by stressing the first.

The Three Signs That Have No Singular

Russian has a small class of nouns that exist only in the plural, the way English “scissors” and “trousers” do. Three zodiac signs belong to it: Близнецы, Весы and Рыбы.

This has a real consequence. You cannot say “I am a Libra” in Russian using a singular noun, because there isn’t one for the sign. Russian speakers say я Весы — “I am Scales”, plural — or reach for the adjective form instead. The other nine signs are ordinary singular masculine or feminine nouns and behave normally.

The Genitive Forms Every Horoscope Uses

This is the part that catches learners. A Russian horoscope headline does not say “Aries” — it says “the horoscope of Aries”, and that requires the genitive case, which changes the word.

Look at what happens to three of them. Овен loses its vowel and becomes Овна. Лев becomes Льва. Телец becomes Тельца. These are fleeting vowels — a normal feature of Russian nouns, and the reason a search for “Овен” and a search for “Овна” are effectively the same query in Russian but look unrelated to anyone who does not know the grammar.

Four Russian Star Signs Worth a Closer Look

Sagittarius in Russian: Стрелец

Strelets means a shooter, from стрела, an arrow. But the word carries a second, entirely historical meaning: the streltsy were the musketeer corps of the Tsars from the sixteenth century until Peter the Great destroyed them. So a Russian reading Стрелец hears both an archer and a specific piece of Russian military history — a resonance no other language’s Sagittarius has. See the Sagittarius profile.

Aquarius in Russian: Водолей

Vodoley is built from вода (water) and a root meaning to pour: the water-pourer. It is one of the most precise renderings of the Latin Aquarius anywhere on this site — closer than the Germanic “water man”, which says nothing about pouring. French Verseau makes the same choice. See the Aquarius profile.

Capricorn in Russian: Козерог

Kozerog is коза (goat) plus рог (horn) — a direct calque of Latin capricornus, built element for element from Slavic parts. Russian did not borrow the word; it rebuilt it. And like the Germanic languages, it dropped the fish tail. Read the Capricorn profile.

Cancer in Russian: Рак

Rak covers crayfish and crab together, and also means cancer the disease, as in most European languages. It is the shortest sign name in Russian and appears in a well-known idiom — когда рак на горе свистнет, “when the crayfish whistles on the mountain”, the Russian equivalent of “when pigs fly”. Read the Cancer profile.

The Remaining Eight

• Овен — an archaic word for ram, preserved almost solely in this sign; modern Russian for ram is баран. The Aries profile.
• Телец — a young bull or calf, also archaic; the everyday word is бык. It appears in the biblical golden calf, золотой телец. The Taurus profile.
• Близнецы — twins, from a root meaning “near”. Plural only. The Gemini profile.
• Лев — lion, and one of the most common Russian given names. The Leo profile.
• Дева — a maiden or young woman, archaic and poetic. Russian chose the maiden over the virgin, like the Scandinavian languages. The Virgo profile.
• Весы — scales, plural only, and also the ordinary word for any weighing device including a bathroom scale. The Libra profile.
• Скорпион — the single loanword in the Russian list, for the usual reason. The Scorpio profile.
• Рыбы — fishes, plural of рыба. The Pisces profile.

Notice that three signs — Овен, Телец and Дева — use words that are archaic in modern Russian. The zodiac has preserved a small pocket of Old Church Slavonic vocabulary that has otherwise dropped out of the language.

Talking About Zodiac Signs in Russian

The phrases:

• Кто ты по знаку зодиака? — Kto ty po znaku zodiaka? — What’s your star sign? (Literally “who are you by zodiac sign”.)
• Я Скорпион. — Ya Skorpion. — I’m a Scorpio.
• Я по знаку Весы. — Ya po znaku Vesy. — I’m a Libra by sign.
• Типичный Козерог. — Tipichnyy Kozerog. — Typical Capricorn.

That first question is worth learning as a fixed phrase. Russian does not ask “what is your sign” but “who are you by sign”, which is a different construction from anything in the European languages on this site.

Goroskop in Russian-Speaking Media

Horoscopes are a fixture of Russian-language print and television, and the format tends to be longer and more specific than the Western one-paragraph column — often broken out by love, work, health and finances for each sign. The register sits between the Scandinavian wink and the Brazilian warmth.

Worth noting for anyone building content here: these names are shared across the Russian-speaking world, so the same twelve words serve readers in Russia, Kazakhstan, Belarus and Russian-speaking communities worldwide. Ukrainian uses closely related but not identical forms.

Frequently Asked Questions

Zodiac Signs in Russian Compared With Other Translating Languages

Russian belongs with the languages that translated rather than borrowed. The zodiac signs in German made almost identical choices — Steinbock against Козерог, Wassermann against Водолей — and the Swedish and Finnish lists did the same again. For the opposite approach, see the Italian and Spanish lists, which inherited the Latin intact.

All languages: zodiac signs in different languages.