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"The problem of adequate verbalization of emotions, sensations and feelings is one of the most important in modern applied linguistics. It is urgent to create a database of units on different linguistic levels intended for such verbalization. It is important in interdisciplinary branches for the languages with different structure, primarily in clinical practice, since the accuracy of the diagnosis depends on the ability to verbalize the sensations. In particular, this applies to people with a high level of alexithymia, having significant difficulties with naming their feelings. Alexithymia is a specific cognitive characteristic of the individual, affecting the ability to perceive sensations, emotions and feelings, to recognize them and adequately verbalize. Alexithymia may be a predictor or be closely related to a number of psychosomatic disorders that need to be prevented in a timely manner to avoid complications, so it is relevant to develop a linguistically valid psychometric diagnostic toolkit that is currently missing for alexithymic patients on the material of Russian language. This article is devoted to lexical units in the Russian language which are used for pain description. The authors analyze descriptors traditionally included in clinical questionnaires for the diagnosis of pain syndromes based on the explanations presented in the Large Russian Explanatory Dictionary of the Russian Language, ed. PP.A.Kuznetsov, analyze them from the point of view of semantics, paying special attention to such important and diagnostically important types of pain as acute and dull, discuss analytical data on results of the survey in patients who had pain complaints conducted to determine the validity of the proposed verbal descriptors."