| Summary: | This paper discusses encyclopedic module of definitions in language dictionaries as a source of historical and cultural information. The main aim of the study is to reveal and compare the encyclopedic modules of definitions in early dictionaries of Australian and Indian English. The method applied consists in the analysis of the definitions and in the review of citation. The data was selected from two dictionaries on historical principles – Austral English (Morris, 1898) and Hobson-Jobson (Yule and Burnell, 1886). The corpus consists of 320 and 292 articles respectively. The study showed that in both dictionaries encyclopedic module of the definitions overshadows the linguistic one. At the same time, specificity of the nascent varieties of English and particularities of the linguistic situation in Australia and India determined the framework of these dictionaries, mainly the criteria of the entries’ selection and, as a consequence, the lexical domains covered by encyclopedic modules of the definitions.
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