diff --git a/sphinx/search/__init__.py b/sphinx/search/__init__.py
index 0eff2bc70..b4f5a799e 100644
--- a/sphinx/search/__init__.py
+++ b/sphinx/search/__init__.py
@@ -16,7 +16,6 @@ import cPickle as pickle
 from docutils.nodes import raw, comment, title, Text, NodeVisitor, SkipNode
 
 from sphinx.util import jsdump, rpartition
-from sphinx.search.en import SearchEnglish
 
 
 class SearchLanguage(object):
@@ -97,6 +96,10 @@ var Stemmer = function() {
                                      word.isdigit())))
 
 
+# SearchEnglish imported after SearchLanguage is defined due to circular import
+from sphinx.search.en import SearchEnglish
+
+
 def parse_stop_word(source):
     """
     parse snowball style word list like this: