The paper focuses the essence of the wedding ceremony. The purpose of the study is to restore the ritual that took place in the 1950s in the village of Vysokiy, Talovsky District of the Voronezh Region, to describe its cultural elements and accompanying vocabulary that have not been paid due attention to in previous research. The material of the research is the living popular speech, recorded by the author in the course of non-formal natural communication, and the personal archival records of the native dwellers of the village. Tthe following methods were used in the course of the work: survey, interview, stationary observation, analysis, comparison, description, etc. As a result, it was possible to fix the unusual components of the festive event and reproduce them in their original form. Plunging into the past, the author established a sequence of parts of the prewedding, wedding and post-wedding periods, objectifying an interconnected and interdependent system. The meanings of the lexical units, reflecting rituality, were checked using the Small Academic Dictionary, the Explanatory Dictionary of the Living Great Russian Language, the Dictionary of Russian Folk Dialects, the Dictionary of Voronezh Dialects, etc. The study determined the areas of functioning of the words in question in the dialects of other territories, noted the similarity in use, and identified localisms. Having summarized the established norms of organizing ritual actions, the author presented them in the form of a kind of set of universal rules. The constituent elements revealed the essence of the custom, displayed a unique picture of the prevailing rituals in a completely original form, which testifies to the real transformation of the ancient celebration. The novelty of the research lies in the fact that the ritual, which is almost 70 years old, has been restored in detail and presented with the help of the language of the native dwellers of rural areas as an inseparable part of popular culture. The practical significance of the work lies in the fact that the factual information underlying it is sure to help the younger generation to reproduce historical reality in the future. The resulting materials supplement the bank of existing data with new information, including valuable data, both from an ethnographic and linguistic point of view. The author hopes that they will be of interest to the linguistic community and a wide range of people interested in traditions.