  the reform of russian orthography refers to official and unofficial changes made to the russian alphabet over the course of the history of the russian language, and in particular those made between the 18th-20th centuries. == early changes == the old russian language adopted the cyrillic script, approximately during the 10th century and at about the same time as the introduction of eastern christianity into the territories inhabited by the eastern slavs. in this way, no sharp distinction was drawn between the vernacular language and the liturgical, though the latter was based on south slavic rather than eastern slavic norms. as the language evolved, several letters, notably the yuses () were gradually and unsystematically discarded from both secular and church usage over the next centuries, and not one of several attempts at linguistic standardization properly succeeded. == 18th-century changes ==   the printed russian alphabet began to assume its modern shape when peter i introduced his civil script ( (spelled "Ð³ÑÐ°Ð¶Ð´Ð°Ð½ÑÐºÐ¸Ð¹ ÑÑÐ¸ÑÑ" in modern russian), ) in 1708. the reform was not specifically orthographic in nature. however, with the effective elimination of several letters () as well as all diacritics and accents (with the exception of Ð¹) from secular usage, there appeared for the first time a visual distinction between russian and church slavonic writing. with the strength of the historic tradition diminishing, russian spelling in the 18th century became rather inconsistent, both in practice and in theory, as mikhail lomonosov advocated a morphological orthography, vasily trediakovsky a phonetical one. == 19th-century changes == throughout the 18th and 19th centuries, miscellaneous adjustments were made on an ad hoc basis, as the russian literary language came to assume its modern and highly standardized form. these included the introduction of the letter Ñ  (yo) and the gradual loss of  (izhitsa, corresponding to the greek upsilon and the latin y), in favor of Ð¸ (both of which represented ); and  (corresponding to the greek theta), in favor of Ñ or Ñ. by 1917, the only two words still usually spelled with  were  (mÃ¼ro, 
Orthography_reform Russian_language Spelling_reform