Phraseologisms, or multi-word items, occur in most languages, but they may cause serious problems for foreign language learners. This article describes what Polish multi-word items were included and how they were translated into English in the first bilingual Polish-English dictionary by Erazm Rykaczewski. No fully-fledged diachronic study on phraseology in Polish-English and English-Polish bilingual dictionaries has ever been carried out, so the present article is a modest introduction to this field of research. A modern typology of phraseologisms has been applied for this purpose. 