The problem of background knowledge in the vocabulary of the Russian and English languages and their reflection in the explanatory dictionaries

Problem and purpose. The tendencies of the last decades in the world of lexicography are a gradual transformation of passive (explanatory) dictionaries into active type dictionaries with a communicative orientation and a transition from a purely philological description of a word to its integral philological and cultural description involving elements of encyclopedic, ethic and linguistic knowledge. The purpose of the article is to determine the necessity of extra-linguistic information to be entered in a dictionary, the degree of its novelty and the possibility of applying language policy to it because, despite the language tradition, the current knownness of an event or phenomenon not everything, that is acceptable in the situation of domestic or Internet communication, gets implemented in the norm. The methodology of the study is based on linguoculturological, lexicographic and contextual analysis and on the comparative method. It is backed by the works of F.A. Litvin, L.P. Krysin and Yu.D. Apresyan. The conclusion. Language is not an established set of nominative signs, but is a product of communicative situations and cognitive processes, which to a greater or lesser extent are a reflection of cultural phenomena. However, not all widely popular conceptual models remain in the language system for an unlimited time period, thus, the relevance of entering them into dictionaries might get lost.