The singular form has occasionally been construed as plural.
1885
The refreshment-room is enormous,..with a great buffet at one end, whither the Russians resort before dinner for the customary zakuska of pickles, sardines, vodki, &c.
A. J. C. Hare, Studies in Russia v. 203
1919
The ‘Zakuska’ were on a side-table near the door—herrings and ham and smoked fish and radishes and mushrooms and tongue and caviare.
H. Walpole, Secret Cityi. xii. 79
1920
It began with many zakuskas, consisting principally of dubious-looking tinned fish.
E. Sykes & P. Sykes, Through Deserts & Oases of Central Asia iv. 73
1922
The emotion..was diverted by the appearance of two Chinese servants in long silk robes and four-sided hats with cocktails and zakouski.
W. S. Maugham, On Chinese Screen vi. 27
1933
There were also little snippets of lobster in tomato cocktails, which were among the least successful of zakouska that I have ever known.
H. Nicolson, Letter 7 November (1966) 156
1951
I detest crowds, harried waiters, Bohemians, vermouth concoctions, coffee, zakuski, floor shows and so forth.
V. Nabokov, Speak, Memory xiv. 213
1981
The Zakouski, the borshch and the blini of his homeland.
Some consonants can take the function of the vowel in unstressed syllables. Where necessary, a syllabic marker diacritic is used, hence /ˈpɛtl/ but /ˈpɛtl̩i/.
Vowels
iːfleece
ihappy
ɪkit
ɛdress
atrap, bath
ɑːstart, palm, bath
ɒlot
ɔːthought, force
ʌstrut
ʊfoot
uːgoose
əletter
əːnurse
ɪənear
ɛːsquare
ʊəcure
eɪface
ʌɪpride
aʊmouth
əʊgoat
ɔɪvoice
ãgratin
ɒ̃salon
ᵻ(/ɪ/-/ə/)
ᵿ(/ʊ/-/ə/)
Other symbols
The symbol ˈ at the beginning of a syllable indicates that that syllable is pronounced with primary stress.
The symbol ˌ at the beginning of a syllable indicates that that syllable is pronounced with secondary stress.
Round brackets ( ) in a transcription indicate that the symbol within the brackets is optional.
zakuska typically occurs fewer than 0.01 times per million words in modern written English.
zakuska is in frequency band 2, which contains words occurring between 0.001 and 0.01 times per million words in modern written English. More about OED's frequency bands
Frequency data is computed programmatically, and should be regarded as an estimate.
Frequency of zakuska, n., 1880–2010
* Occurrences per million words in written English
Historical frequency series are derived from Google Books Ngrams (version 2), a data set based on the Google Books corpus of several million books printed in English between 1500 and 2010.
The overall frequency for a given word is calculated by summing frequencies for the main form of the word, any plural or inflected forms, and any major spelling variations.
For sets of homographs (distinct entries that share the same word-form, e.g. mole, n.¹, mole, n.², mole, n.³, etc.), we have estimated the frequency of each homograph entry as a fraction of the total Ngrams frequency for the word-form. This may result in inaccuracies.
Smoothing has been applied to series for lower-frequency words, using a moving-average algorithm. This reduces short-term fluctuations, which may be produced by variability in the content of the Google Books corpus.
Decade
Frequency per million words
1880
0.0068
1890
0.0067
1900
0.0065
1910
0.0067
1920
0.0066
1930
0.0063
1940
0.0058
1950
0.0045
1960
0.0039
1970
0.0034
1980
0.0025
1990
0.0023
2000
0.0024
2010
0.0024
zakuska, n. was first published in 1986; not fully revised.