Words altar, iconostasis, parvis, narthex: from the experience of lexicographic analysis

The article analyzes the semantic structure of the nouns included in the thematic group «Church premises, their parts», draws conclusions about quantitative and qualitative changes. The material of the research is dictionary articles from Russian Explanatory Dictionaries of different years, as a result of our investigation the volume and content of some lexemes are explored; there are also differences in the area of citations and illustrations in the sources used.