The article is an attempt to answer the question: is it justified to include in the academic dictionaries’ lexical units of substandard vocabulary — elements of colloquial speech, vernacular, jargon, slang, etc.? The article discusses whether it is justified to include in the academic dictionaries’ lexical units of substandard vocabulary — units of colloquial speech, vernacular, jargon, slang, etc. At different times, the authors of academic dictionaries were reproached (and are reproached today) for excessive democracy: according to critics, the normative dictionary should reflect strictly standard norm, the description of the substandard vocabulary in the normative dictionary is unacceptable. The problem mentioned above is studied on the material of two dictionaries — the Academic Explanatory Dictionary of the Russian Language and the Academic Russian Orthographic Dictionary. The first part of the article is devoted to the description of representation of units of non-codified subsystems of the Russian language in Academic Explanatory Dictionary of the Russian Language, the second part of the article deals with problems connected to the presentation of reduced words in the orthographic dictionary. The author refutes the thesis about the inadmissibility of including units of substandard lexis in the academic standard dictionary. The author comes to the conclusio that reflection of elements of non-codified subsystems in the normative dictionary does not lower the quality of the dictionary, but, on the contrary, it is necessary for the description of the standard language.