The relevance of the study is determined by the active use of foreign words in the media space, this fact contributes to widespread occurrence of anglicisms and their penetration into the Russian language. The research aims to define peculiarities of using foreign words in modern Russian newspapers and specific features of their assimilation in the Russian language. The novelty is characterized both by the analyzed language material and the research approach which focuses attention not on the result but mainly on the process of borrowing foreign words, defines stages of their assimilation in the receiving language. The research is carried out on the basis of newspaper subcorpus of the National Corpus of the Russian Language since 2000. All the examples of recoded lexical items were analyzed according to their graphics, semantics, morphology, syntax and stylistics. The methods of comparative, contextual and distributive analysis as well as statistic methods were used during the research. The proposed theory of step-by-step acquisition of foreign words at different language levels has theoretical relevance. A particular group of foreign words recoded from foreign languages but not yet adopted by the Russian language system has been examined. The practical relevance consists in revealing some peculiarities of recoded words assimilation in written texts. The author shows that foreign words receive some morphological features, display particular word-building activity and have syntagmatic associations typical for the host language just before they enter the receiving language system. The research may be useful for further studies and finding solutions to the problems of the penetration of lexical items with foreign origin and their assimilation in the receiving language.