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Abstract: The article deals with the problem of selection of lexicographical sources for comparative study of metaphors in Russian and English from the 1st half of the 20th century to the beginning of the 21st century. The main principles of selection and the peculiarities of a dictionary entry as a genre are considered. The author makes a conclusion that an entry of any single dictionary does not reflect the true semantic structure of the word fully, thus it is necessary to use several dictionaries for the analysis. She offers a typology of dictionaries by S.I. Ozhegov. The article contains information on the most well-known and widely used dictionaries and undertakes a comparison of their entries to find out the peculiarities of presentation of the semantic structure of a word in each of them. Three dictionaries in each language have been chosen; they are close in structure and volume and represent three chronological periods in the development of the two languages: the 1930s, the turn of 1970s and 1980s, and the beginning of the 21st century. The article can help those who are looking for dictionaries for semantic analysis of words.