The article represents historical limits of periods of the English mining terminology formation. On the basis of extra-linguistic data there has been made an attempt to find the terms which became the foundation for the English mining terminology as a scientific sublanguage.

A great number of terms referring to the mining sphere in German, French and especially in English holds the imprints of the naive perception of the world. An anthropomorphous nature of mining terms shows the elements of archetypes typical of the languages involved.