A Russian linguist V. Šercl (1843-1906) is known, on the one hand, as the author of various papers on the formal aspects of language (as, for instance, Comparative Grammar of Slavic and Other Cognate Languages /1871-1873/) and, on the other hand, as a semasiologist (see, for example, his work on enantiosemy /1884/). It is the latter area of Šercl’s activity that requires closer attention. The article focuses on Šercl’s works On Concreteness in Language (1884) and Basic Elements of Language and Principles of its Development (1885-1889). Considering these works in the context of modern scientific paradigm, the author of the article emphasizes their great significance for historical semasiology and typologic study of semantics. Despite the fact that arduous work at critical analysis of the examples provided by Šercl is still ahead, the author of the article claims Šercl to have tried to reveal lexical and semantic universals long before the dictionary of C. D. Buck was published. Thus V. Šercl can undoubtedly be placed among those who stood at the beginning of Russian and European „semasiological” thought. In the work Basic Elements of Language and Principles of Its Development, V. Šercl presents a typology of onomatopoeic words in various thematic groups and numerous subgroups (the thematic group of animal names alone consists of 14 subgroups!) presents a typology of onomatopoeic words, presenting vocabulary material on more than 50 pages. In the works of Šercl we find many examples of the so-called regionalisms from various languages. As an illustration, we show common and dialect (regional) words of the Russian language, expressing the concepts of fever and nonsense. Šercl’s material is not only regionalisms, it is also slang (social dialects), vocabulary in a historical aspect, etc. Čeněk Šercl actively uses the data of dialects of Latvian and other languages. He etymologizes the words of the Latvian language long before the appearance of the Mühlenbach-Endzelīns dictionary. V. Šercl includes the Latvian dialect pepe ‘meat, porridge’ in his discussions about the onomatopoeic nature of words in the languages of the world. In Russian dialects, there is папка in the meaning of ‘bread, bun’, which, in our opinion, correlates with the Latvian pepe. However, there are no examples from the Baltic languages in the etymological dictionaries of Slavic languages, but baby talk is chosen as the basic etymology of Slavic lexemes. Our article also deals with the etymology of the Latvian tēvs/ tētis. According to modern etymological dictionaries and Šercl's version, Latvian tētis (Russian dialect тата, etc.) was formed in children's speech through the reduplication of the syllable te (ta), tēvs is based on I.-E. te (from children's speech). In addition, such a common method of forming new words in dialects as reduplication, as Šercl writes, deserves close attention and further study.