The editors of the Hungarian – Rusyn Dictionary published in 1928 in Uzhhorod, then the capital city of Subcarpathian Rus, a part of the Czechoslovak Republic, noted in the Preface that their oeuvre was the first attempt (after the Rusyn – Hungarian Dictionary by László Csopey published in 1883) of collecting “the means of the Rusyn idiom,” which became especially important “since Rusyn had become an official language at schools and offices, and used in the public life of Subcarpathian Rusyn intelligentsia.” Another important reason for such dictionary to appear was “for the use of the school youth.” One more attempt of the kind had been taken by A. Beskyd (this refers to Nykolaj Beskyd’s 1920 dictionary), but the editors of the reviewed Dictionary stated that it had been “much smaller in volume and provided only Great Russian words.”

Like Csopey nearly half a century before and the authors of the Hungarian – Rusyn Textbook for Hungarian Royal Army and Levente Cadets published in 1940, the editors of this Dictionary used the terms Little-Russian and Ukrainian as synonyms to Rusyn; but unlike in the Textbook, they, following Csopey’s thread (and directly quoting him), expressly stated that “the Rusyn language is independent and may not be considered as merely a patois of the Great (or All-) Russian language.” To support their assertion and persuade the readers from identifying Rusyn and Great Russian which was promoted by the Russophile team of local intelligentsia and supported by numerous émigrés that had arrived at Czechoslovakia after the October coup, the editors referred to the names of prominent linguists (Miklošič, Lucskay, Schleicher and others) and the resolutions of the St. Petersburg Academy of Science (1905) and the special Czechoslovakian commission (1919).

Belonging to the camp of Ukrainophiles, the editors of the reviewed book consistently used the phonetic principle of orthography, though they retained such etymologic features as the use of ô to designate the correspondence between the sounds /i/, /u/, or /ü/ in different Rusyn varieties in the region, and the use of the etymological ѣ where it is pronounced as /i/.

The editors declared that their aim was to render Hungarian words into Rusyn as precisely as possible; therefore first of all what they chose were “local words,” supplemented with the words and expressions taken from B. Hrinchenko’s Dictionary of the Ukrainian Language (1907). It is worth noting that place names and personal names are given in their traditional forms both in Hungarian and Rusyn: e.g., János – Иван, [Иван]ко, Jenő – Євген; Eperjes – Пряшôв [for Prešov].