Abstract
The paper addresses the issues of diachronic description in East Slavic languages. The analysis is based on a study of origin and semantics of genetically related vocabulary in consideration of the actual problems of the historical word formation lexicology and lexicography of Slavic languages. The study involves pre-Slavic vocabulary, of ancient and modern East languages, united in the genetic paradigm, which consists of etymological families with vertices *Dati, *Bьrati, *Imati//Imѣti, *Nesti.