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Abstract: The article is devoted to the first English-Russian and Russian-English educational dictionaries that were compiled in Russia in the period of the second half of the XVIII – the early XIX century. The dictionaries were used in the teaching practice and – by extension – by the general public outside the educational institutions. The aim of the research is to study and analyze the texts of the above-mentioned dictionaries, to outline the reasons and contexts of their appearance. To carry out research, a comprehensive interdisciplinary approach was used, as well as methods of historical text analysis. Data of historical lexicography and the history of Russian pedagogies were also taken into account. During the period under review, unlike other European languages, German and French in particular, English was not very popular with the Russian public. English was taught on a regular basis only at the Naval Cadet Corps in St. Petersburg. The Corps teachers became the first Russian authors of the English-Russian and Russian-English dictionaries in the country. The article discusses a dictionary in six languages by G. Poletika (1763), in which English was used for the first time in domestic lexicography; English-Russian dictionaries by P. Zhdanov (1772 and 1784) and by A. Shishkov (1795); the first Russian-English dictionary by I. Shishukov (1808–1811). It is shown how the authors of dictionaries moved from the ideographic principle of vocabulary presentation to the alphabetical one, how the system of labels was developed and expanded. It is difficult to overestimate the role of the dictionaries under discussion – they laid the foundation for the national English-Russian and Russian-English lexicography that developed productively in later years.