The present work discusses the issues of the variantivity of borrowings from English into modern Polish and Russian. The material for study is variants of English borrowings (based on spelling, spelling and pronunciation, stress pattern, and morphology), excerpted mainly from newest dictionaries of foreign words that have been published over the last 15 years. The analysis aims to determine common “regular correspondencies” of such variants present in the two Slavic languages under discussion, and to identify the individualised variances typical of a particular national language. An important objective of the study is also to specify the reasons why alternative forms have been emerging so numerously in both languages, and to unearth some problems underlying the variantivity of Anglicisms. The research presented in this paper is significant for several perspectives: firstly, variantivity is a challenge to lexicographers and normative linguists still attempting to standardise the enormity of foreign lexical items of an unstable form. Secondly, the fact that a given item has its equivalents poses a problem to average language users who are often confused and do not know how to write or pronounce a word, with dictionaries not necessarily being helpful in this respect. The obtained results may encourage further steps towards the systematization of principles governing the adaptation of borrowings and the attempts to tame the present escalating chaos in Polish and Russian literature on the subject.

One of the common reasons for borrowing is the introduction of new objects or the rise of new cultural, historical, political or social phenomena and the need to name them. The import of loanwords is extremely common in the domain of sports, especially as new disciplines develop, because, as Jarosz (2015) noted, general language is insufficient for dealing with various aspects characteristic of a given discipline, such as actions or equipment. Thus, within sports vocabulary a great deal of newly coined lexemes may be found, which have been categorised by Ożdżyński (1970) as: (i) loanwords, (ii) native neologisms (derivatives and compounds), (iii) semantic neologisms, and (iv) phraseological units.
It is believed that the terminology related to various billiard sports depicts the provenance of the discipline. For instance, a Polish pool-billiard (pocket-billiard) player pots balls into a pocket called łuza, which seems to have been borrowed from French, whereas a Polish snooker player pots balls into a pocket called kieszeń, which is a loan translation from English.
The aim of the article is to investigate the sports vocabulary used by snooker commentators in order to ascertain the kind of terminology that has been adopted by Polish commentators to cover the meanings related to snooker. As this discipline is relatively young, having been popularised in Poland only at the turn of the 20th and 21st centuries, the vocabulary is still developing. Therefore, the choice of spoken language to conduct the analysis gives us a chance to see the most up-to-date state of the lexicon. Attention will be paid to the various types of borrowings in order to see the motivation behind the processes involved in coining particular lexical items. The study has been based on approximately 130 hours of live coverage of the World Snooker Championship 2021.