The article presents an analysis of borrowings from the Turkic languages in the morphological aspect. The research sources are academic dictionaries of the Russian literary language published from the 18th till the 20th centuries. The selection of sources enables to most comprehensively study the common lexis of the literary language. The comparison of lexicographic sources of various periods and the comparative analysis of the Turkic units represented in them allows tracing the morphological changes of a borrowed word in the language, as well as revealing the features of functioning of the Turkic layer within the Russian lexis. It was found that borrowed words acquire the grammatical categories inherent in the Russian nouns. Shaping of the gender category in borrowed nouns takes place in compliance with the Russian language norms. Thus, the grounds for referring the borrowed words to a masculine, feminine or neuter gender are, in most cases, formal markers of flections, which were present in the words in Tatar and preserved after their transition into Russian, as well as those acquired in the Russian language due to a phonetic transformation.