Abstract
This article presents the semantic-syntactic characteristics of the Russian word odin 'only' and its semantic distinction from odin 'alone, without others'. The material from the Russian National Corpus shows that development went in two different directions after the eighteenth century: on the one hand, the lexeme odin was grammaticalized in the direction of a focus particle with the meaning 'only', which in modern Russian is most often denoted by the particle tolko, and, on the other hand, odin 'only' gradually began to be used increasingly less often, despite its grammaticalization.