The purpose of this paper is to reconstruct the understanding of the concept of democracy (Demokratie) in German by means of a cognitive definition developed and operationalized on the grounds of the analyses of the “Lublin School of Ethnolinguistics”. This type of definition is aimed at recreating the “cognitive structure” of the concept by giving all its linguistically and culturally relevant, stabilized and fixed features. Three types of sources were used as the material basis: dictionary, survey and text (including corpus), which were treated “separatively”. The synthetic cognitive definition of the Demokratie concept included features that could be focused around the following facets: hyperonyms, opposites, collections, social attributes, political attributes, ethical attributes, economic attributes.