What the heck is ‘POCCNR’ & how is it related to Russia?

Varvara Grankova
The mysterious term is sometimes used to refer to the largest country in the world. But why?

It’s not too hard to come across the mysterious term ‘POCCNR’ when googling Russia-related stuff. For example, a T-shirt on Amazon, featuring a Russian flag, map and national emblem, is referred to as a POCCNR T-shirt. 

But what is POCCNR?

It’s actually very simple: it’s the transliteration of the Cyrillic word РОССИЯ (“Rossiya”) in English in capital letters. And guess what ‘Rossiya’ means? It means ‘Russia’ in Russian!

Note how the first four letters of the term POCCNR imitate the first four letters of the Russian word РОССИЯ? In the absence of the Cyrillic letters ‘И’ and ‘Я’ in the English alphabet, these two letters were simply substituted with existing letters that looked most similar. Thus, И became N and Я became R.

As a result of this unsophisticated swapping, РОССИЯ became POCCNR, a term now often found online to depict ‘Russian’ Russia! Simples!

Bonus points if you can tell us what HJCCBZ could mean!


Click here for 10 Russian words impossible to translate into English.

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