The article is devoted to the abbreviations basic characteristics determination and the principles of their lexicographic description in the “Dictionary of Russian Language Abbreviations”, created by the Experimental Laboratory of Abbreviation Trends Research at the Russian Language Department of Donetsk National University. The urgency of the work is determined, firstly, by the attempts to give a consistent interpretation of the language unit, which is considered as one of the main means of new nominations forming at this stage of Russian language development and, secondly, by the fact that there are no dictionaries that give a relevant comprehensive description of these language units; the necessity of their creation is to help a native speaker to “model” the meanings of new items on the basis of described semantics and tactics of abbreviated constructs usage. On the one hand, the declared topic involves determining the abbreviated construct status, its similarities and differences with affixoids and words; on the other hand, it is important to establish the unit basic characteristics and describe them in the “Dictionary of Russian Language abbreviated constructs”. There have been studied 590 abbreviated constructs selected from the material of “The Explanatory Dictionary of Russian Abbreviated Words”. The study uses the traditional descriptive method - observation, generalization, interpretation and classification - and the methods and techniques of equivalence analysis developed by the Experimental Laboratory of Abbreviation Studies, which include methods and techniques of prediction and confirmation by means of equivalent texts of equivalence relations between a word and its descriptive equivalent, onomasiological analysis of compound abbreviation meaning structure; analysis of the formal correlation of the abbreviation structure and its descriptive equivalence. The work practical significance is supported by material selection methods and material description that can be used in compiling different types of abbreviations dictionaries: initial abbreviations dictionaries, ideographic abbreviations dictionaries, etc. In addition, dictionary entries of the Abbreviated Constructs Dictionary can be used in explanatory dictionaries so as to describe “complex words first parts”.