The paper discusses the somatic code of culture, defined as a set of names of body parts, bearing additional, culturally significant meanings. Taken as a unit of the code of culture under analysis is the somatic concept. The aim of the research is to identify the ethno-cultural peculiarities of somatic concepts as units of somatic code of the Russian and English languages. The comparative analysis made it possible to identify a certain asymmetry in the representation of the human body in the English and Russian language pictures of the world. The asymmetry of the use is explicated in the presence of gaps, i.e. in the absence of lexemes in idioms of one language and their presence in those of another language. A quantitative asymmetry manifests itself in a different frequency of somatisms in Russian and English proverbs and phraseological units, which indicates the degree of relevance of one or another concept for different ethnic communities.