The everyday life during the coronavirus pandemic is reflected, first and foremost, in the vocabulary of the Russian language. The neologisms that have appeared in Russian were created according to the existing rules and models of word formation. The main question of this research is which word formation methods were most frequently used in the process of creating neologisms during the pandemic. The theoretical part of the thesis discusses the issues of the emergence of these neologisms and role of the media as the main intermediary in the diffusion of neologisms that appeared during the coronavirus era, when the language was significantly enriched with numerous lexical units. The contemporary methods of word formation and their classifications are considered in the context of theoretical neology. The research is based on the analysis of neologisms of coronavirus era and examples of their usage in the broad sphere of Russian media. In the research process, a wide range of new words in the Russian language was examined, and the neologisms selected from materials found in the media were analyzed according to their word formation method. Furthermore, the neologisms were categorized into three groups, depending on the word formation method that defines them: borrowings, wordformation neologisms, and semantic neologisms. The most productive words of the analyzed era were ковид, коронавирус and корона as they proved to be the most productive bases for the creation of new words. The conclusion of the research is that word-formation neologisms created through affixation and compounding constitute the largest group of neologisms that emerged during the pandemic.