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What is the difference between the adjectives "разный" and "различный". Are they used in different situations?

Barbara
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3 Answers3

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These are synonyms, and are interchangeable in many situations. Разный is more like different, whereas различный is more like various. When you're contrasting two objects, разный is preferable. For example:

У нас с сестрой глаза разного цвета (My sister and I have different eye colors)

У нас с сестрой глаза различного цвета (My sister and I have various eye colors)

Community
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Armen Tsirunyan
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    "У нас с сестрой глаза различного цвета" is a perfectly fine sentence, but it would literally mean that for both of you, one eye has a different color than the other eye (глаза различного цвета = гетерохромия)- an entirely different meaning than 'various'. – Peteris Jul 16 '14 at 21:13
  • @Peteris: You're right, that meaning didn't occur to me. This is fun :) – Armen Tsirunyan Jul 16 '14 at 21:24
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In mathematics the term различный is used more often, corresponding to "distinct" (not "various", as Armen writes) instead of "different", e.g., Пусть p и q различные простые числа (Let p and q be distinct primes).

KCd
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The best way to find the difference is to try to replace them with each other in different contexts and see what happens ;-)

  • У нас разные мнения - our views are different but most likely they do not contradict
  • У нас различные мнения - our views very likely contradict each other
  • Занят разными/различными делами
  • два различных предмета - from an example here, you can see the opposition more clearly when 2 is used

So my conclusion is that these are synonyms but you should consider различный if you want to underline the opposition / contrast / contradiction / conflict of some qualities or features.

Think of различный as of a word in the same semantic field as the words: различаться, различие. In Enlish it is differ, different, difference while разный is more like various, not similar but can also mean different because разный has a wider semantic field and is a more frequent word.

Vitaly Sazanovich
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