The article considers derived substantives in terms of ethnolinguistics, they serve as designations of the Russian house “cloth” decoration elements. The purpose of the work is to identify and describe lexical and word–formation semantics, typical word-formation models, as well as the internal form specifics of outdated household names. The study has found that the use of various nominative techniques, and above all, morphological methods of word formation, indicates that the objects of naming are involved in the sphere of social and everyday relations, their names reflect familiar to the Russian ethnic group view of things and their interrelationship. The semantics of such words focus on associative signs and representations related to spiritual, social and industrial activities of native speakers. The considered wordformation models and the range of word-formation meanings (of a concretizing or, conversely, generalizing type) allowed us to take a fresh look at the process of lexicalization of the internal word form and characterize the formation dynamics and the entry of a nominative unit into the vocabulary of the language. The derived names of artifacts, their semantic and linguistic-cultural features, as well as idioethnic labeling confirm the fact of the word formation selectivity. The subject’s signs and properties most relevant for linguistic consciousness are subject to lexical transformation and modification, which indicates the pragmatic orientation of nominative processes. The obsolete derivative words, being designations of the realities of material culture, allow describing the national and cultural originality of the lexical, semantic and derivational space of the Russian language.