The article discusses the history and methodology of the Ural school of etymology, onomastics and ethnolinguistics, which has existed for more than 60 years at the Department of the Russian Language and General Linguistics of the Ural University (currently under the guidance of Corresponding Member of the Russian Academy of Sciences E.L. Berezovich and Prof. M.E. Ruth). The review summarizes the methodology of research conducted by the school at the beginning of the 21st century. The main vector of the development of the School, set by the founder of the school A.K. Matveev, is associated with the study of onomastics, the etymological reconstruction of vocabulary and the identification of the results of language contacts. Initially, toponymy was the area of interest, then collective nicknames, astronyms, chrononyms and ethnonyms, as well as various categories of appellative vocabulary, were included in the circle of facts studied. The school’s research is based mainly on its own lexical, onomastic and ethnographic materials collected in the process of field research on the territory of the Russian North. The materials of the card files of the Toponymic Expedition formed the basis of many lexicographic publications. The appearance of the first ethnolinguistic studies was due to the accumulation of experience in the semantic and etymological study of Russian dialect and Slavic vocabulary, as well as systemic ideographic analysis. The ethnolinguistic study of onomastics began with the works of M.E. Ruth on folk astronomy, E.L. Berezovich on North Russian toponymy and was continued in the dissertations of their followers. The paper presents (1) the basic principles of the ethnolinguistic study of onomastics and dialect vocabulary (linguocentricity, breadth of language material, consistency, dialectality, diachronism, a wide historical and cultural context); (2) key sources of ethno-cultural information (internal form of the word, structure of the meaning of the word, semantic-motivational connections of the word, configuration of the ideographic grid); (3) the predominant objects of analysis (semantic-derivational nest, semantic-motivational field); (4) the main methods (motivational, contrastive, areal-typological, ideographic, field and contextual analysis method, etc.); (5) the principles of semantic-motivational reconstruction (maximum systematization of the material, the method of semantic-motivational modeling, distributive analysis, the search for typologically similar phenomena in other languages, the search for semantic parallels in the field of culture); (6) ways of presenting ethnocultural information (method of ethnolinguistic portraiture). A new research direction of the School was the study of the terminology of mining andjewelry, the folk nomenclature of stone, including sociolects - the jargon of miners, prospectors, mineralogists; the slang of illegal diggers; trade names.