In her excellent Friday post about telephone-related expressions, Natalie mentioned the verb вешать — which is literally “to hang,” and in the context of telephones can mean “to end the phone call by hanging up.” So I wanted to take a closer look at вешать, along with some other verbs (and a few nouns) that are etymologically linked to it — and therefore potentially confusing for non-Russians. And just as a reminder, whenever you see black text highlighted in yellow, you can “mouse-hover” on it for some optional pop-up commentary.

Let’s start out with the imperfective verb висеть, which means “to hang” in the intransitive sense of “to be in a hanging position; to be dangling.” Because it refers to a “continuous state” of hanging/dangling, it’s nearly always used in the imperfective (technically, it’s possible to form certain colloquial perfectives for this verb, but for now, we’ll just pretend that it’s “never perfective”). Also, although it has an imperative form, in practice there are only limited contexts in which you would tell someone “go be dangling!” So, here’s how it conjugates (and note that the -с- “mutates” to -ш- in the first-person singular):

висеть
Past	висел, -а, -о, -и
	sing.	pl.
1st	вишу	висим
2nd	висишь	висите
3rd	висит	висят
Imperative	виси! висите!
Derived Adjective	висячий

Theoretically, the present active participle would be висящий, but as far as I know, the adjective with -чий is generally used instead. (For instance, “suspension bridge” can be translated with висячий мост, literally “a bridge that’s hanging”.)

Here’s an example of висеть in usage:

В пыльной темноте старого замка, крупный жёлтый паук висел с потолка.
In the dusty darkness of the old castle, a huge yellow spider was hanging from the ceiling.

And if you’re a classical-mythology geek (or just a “big drama queen”), here’s another good one to know:

О горе мне, «дамоклов меч» висит над моей головой!
Oh, woe betide me, the “sword of Damocles” hangs over my head!

On the other hand, when you mean “to hang” in the transitive sense of “to put something/somebody into a hanging position,” then you use the verb pair вешать/повесить. If you know how to conjugate regular -е- verbs such as читать (“to read”), the imperfective вешать is a cinch and there are no surprises to worry about:

вешать
Past	вешал, -а, -о, -и
	sing.	pl.
1st	вешаю	вешаем
2nd	вешаешь	вешаете
3rd	вешает	вешают
Imperative	вешай! вешайте!

The perfective is just a little bit more tricky because there’s a mutating consonant again:

повесить
Past	повесил, -а, -о, -и
	sing.	pl.
1st	повешу	повесим
2nd	повесишь	повесите
3rd	повесит	повесят
Imperative	повесь! повесьте!

(Pay extra-close attention to the conjugation of повесить, because we’ll be coming back to it later in the post!)

Anyway, when the accusative object of вешать/повесить is something inanimate, the verbs correspond to the English hang, hung, have hung:

Мама повесила картину рядом с зеркалом в ванной.
Mom hung a picture next to the mirror in the bathroom.

HOWEVER, if the direct object is a living person (or, theoretically, an animal), then in most contexts the understood meaning will be “to kill/execute with a noose around the neck” (cf. English hang, hanged, have hanged). For instance:

ПАША: Не правда ли, что в деревне Салеме, сотен людей сожгли заживо, за так называемое “колдовство“?
МАША: Да нет — если я не ошибаюсь, всего двадцать жертв повесили, а никого не жгли.
PAULIE: Isn’t it true that in the village of Salem, they burned hundreds of people alive for so-called “witchcraft”?
MOLLY: No-no-no… if I’m not mistaken, they hanged 20 victims in all, but they didn’t burn anyone.

By the way, Маша is about 99% correct, but she does make one small factual error. If, at some point in your school career, you had to read Arthur Miller’s semi-historical McCarthyism allegory The Crucible, then you may know what her mistake was!

Finally, just for completeness, when you attach the reflexive suffix -ся to вешать/повесить, the translation becomes extremely specific: “to commit suicide by hanging oneself.” (Shurik the inventor makes a wry joke about this in the best Soviet comedy EVER.)

That’s pretty much it for the “to hang” verbs — but as long as we’re discussing them, there’s another set of verbs that I want to cover in this post: the ones meaning “to weigh.” And the reason I strongly recommend learning the “hang” and “weigh” verbs at the same time is that they can be maddeningly easy to confuse with each other! But the good news is that if you’ve thoroughly memorized the conjugation of повесить as given above, you’ll have a much easier time with the “weigh” verbs.

Let’s start with весить, which means “to weigh” intransitively, as in “to have a certain weight.” Like the intransitive висеть (“to be in a hanging position”), this verb is imperfective (because weight is a “continuous” property), and isn’t typically used in the imperative. But apart from the absence of an imperative form, весить conjugates EXACTLY like повесить, only without the по-.

As an example, here’s a classic English mnemonic rhyme for pound/kilogram conversions, translated into literal and not-quite-rhyming Russian:

Два с четвертью фунта джема весят примерно килограмм.
Two-and-a-quarter pounds of jam weigh about a kilogram.

“To weigh” in the transitive sense of “to determine the weight of someone/something” is expressed with the verb pair взвешивать/взвесить. Again, if you know how to conjugate повесить, the perfective взвесить is a cinch: same conjugation (including the imperative), but with вз- instead of по-. And the imperfective взвешивать is also refreshingly predictable: я взвешиваю, ты взвешиваешь, and so forth, with the stress fixed on the first syllable. In fact, the trickiest part of these verbs is not their conjugation, but figuring out how to pronounce that взв- at the beginning! (My suggestion: Practice saying “the slithy toves vomited”.)

Here’s a sentence with the perfective imperative:

«Взвесьте, пожалуйста, семьсот пятьдесят грамм человечьих МОЗГОВ!» — вежливо попросил зомби у продавщицы.
«Квашеных, или сушёных?» — спросила она.
“Please weigh out 750 grams of human B-R-A-A-I-N-S!” — the zombie politely requested of the saleswoman.
“The pickled ones, or the dried?” — she asked.

You can also attach -ся to взвешивать/взвесить, which gives the meaning “to weigh oneself” — just make sure you don’t confuse these reflexive forms with the intransitive весить! For instance, a husband might say to his wife:

«Секундочку, дорогая, я сейчас взвешусь новыми электронными весами — их только что купил, на распродаже…»
«…и неужели я вешу сто восемьдесят три кило?!? Блин, не может быть! …Ага, разобрался — вес показывается “по-пиндостански”! Значит, 183 ФУНТА — ну, нормально. А как поставить весы на килограммы?»
“Hold on a sec, darling, I’m gonna weigh myself with the new electronic scale — I just bought it, on sale…”
“…and can I really weigh a hundred and eighty-three kilos?!? Holy shiiiishkebab, that’s impossible! …Ahaaa, I’ve figured it out — the weight is displaying “in Yankee-ese”! Which means it’s 183 POUNDS — well, that’s not bad. But how do I set the scale to kilograms?”

Like I said at the start of the post, these verbs can be easy to mix up. But with a little time invested in memorizing their conjugations — and more than a few hours of practicing — sooner or later you’ll totally get the hang of them! (You saw that one coming, didn’t you?)