The proposed article is a continuation of the study of the problem of verification of linguistic and cultural constructionsassociated with the analysis of the culturally significant concept of success. The main objective of the article is to apply inpractice the author's methodological considerations regarding the possibilities and limitations of definitional analysis and todemonstrate the interpretive potential of analyzing the dictionary definitions of the word success in Russian language in acognitive way. The material for the analysis was the dictionary definitions of the word success in explanatory dictionaries ofthe pre-revolutionary, Soviet and post-Soviet eras, which clearly demonstrate the variation in the semantic representation of thelexeme success. The analysis is based on a comparison of lexicographic descriptions and is aimed at identifying the semanticstructure of a word. The semantic description is considered as an information base for interpretation from the point of view ofthe characteristics of perception and understanding of the socio-cultural phenomenon of success. As a result of the semanticdescription and cognitive interpretation of each lexical-semantic variant, the invariant meaning of the word is reconstructedand described in a narrative form. It is a cognitive model of a high degree of abstraction, which has a prototypical effect, thatis, it connects the entire network of system-linguistic meanings of a word and underlies context-based and personal-associativeword usage. The article also pays attention to the verification of the results of the definitional analysis of the lexeme successthrough a systematic methodological approach, the essence of which is to establish general semantic patterns at different stagesof the complex semantic analysis of the concept.