Vladimir Dal's father was a Danish physician named Johan Christian von Dahl (1764 – October 21, 1821), a linguist versed in the German, English, French, Russian, Yiddish, Latin, Greek and Hebrew languages.

The future lexicographer was born in the town of Lugansky Zavod (present-day Luhansk, Ukraine), in Novorossiya – then under the jurisdiction of Yekaterinoslav Governorate, part of the Russian Empire.

In the following decade, Dal adopted the pen name Kazak Lugansky ("Cossack from Luhansk") and published several realistic essays in the manner of Nikolai Gogol.

Joachim T. Baer wrote:While Dal was a skilled observer, he lacked talent in developing a story and creating psychological depth for his characters.

Later he collected and recorded fairy tales, folk songs, birch bark woodcuts, and accounts of superstitions, beliefs, and prejudices of the Russian people.

Baer says: "While an excellent collector, Dal had some difficulty ordering his material, and his so-called alphabet-nest system was not completely satisfactory until Baudouin de Courtenay revised it thoroughly in the third (1903–1910) and fourth (1912–1914) editions of the Dictionary.

Both old and popular Russian words seemed gems for which there was absolutely no place in the usual ideological practice of the intelligentsia, in that habitual verbal comfort in simplified speech, composed of international elements.

[7] The encompassing nature of Dal's dictionary gives it critical linguistic importance even today, especially because a large proportion of the dialectal vocabulary he collected has since passed out of use.

In 1840, the Damascus affair had resulted in the accusation that Jews use the blood of Christian children for ritual purposes, and Nicholas I instructed his officials, especially Vladimir Dal, to thoroughly investigate the claim.

In 1914, 42 years after Dal's death, during the blood libel trial of Menahem Mendel Beilis in Kyiv, the then 70-year-old report was published in Saint Petersburg under the title Notes on Ritual Murders.