Opisanie

Opisanie is a term in several Slavic languages that denotes description—the act of describing or the resulting description. In Russian, opisanie (описание) means description, detailing, or portrayal, and is derived from the verb opisat’ “to describe.” Cognate forms exist in other Slavic languages, reflecting a common root for describing. The concept encompasses both the process of describing and the artifact produced by that process.

In everyday and scholarly use, opisanie can refer to descriptive writing that conveys sensory details and factual information about objects, places, people, or events. In information science and librarianship, descriptions are metadata elements used to summarize content, guide discovery, and support indexing. In linguistics and philosophy, description as a methodological approach contrasts with prescriptive rules, focusing on describing actual language use or phenomena rather than prescribing how they should be.

Within literature and discourse, descriptive passages aim to convey appearance, atmosphere, or function rather than to argue or narrate alone. The term also appears in cultural and anthropological contexts, where detailed descriptions of practices, artifacts, or environments are central to ethnographic work. Etymologically, opisanie traces to the verb opisat’ (“to describe”) and related forms across Slavic languages, illustrating the shared heritage of description as a fundamental communicative act.