The article considers the Russian dialectal word kulesh, denoting a character of lower demonology and a guiser (kuleshmenets, kulik, etc.), and other lexemes close to it in the phonetic and word-formational aspects. The author presents an overview of various interpretations of the word's origin and advances her own hypothesis based on newly attested items (including those from unpublished materials of the Ural University Toponymic Expedition). The author supports the opinion
of etymologists that the lexemes with the meaning ‘evil spirit' are loanwords (from Komi-Permyak kul' ‘evil spirit'), but suggests a new motivational version for the words denoting guisers, arguing that the latter were formed rather within the word family of Slavic *kuliti and initially had the meaning of ‘turning' → ‘skin-changing'. The author assumes that, having met in the lexical stock of the dialects
used in the territories of language contacts between Russian and Komi, the two words formed a single morphosemantic fi eld and, in some cases, common semantic paradigms.