An attempt was made in the article to identify sources and ways to update the credit vocabulary in German at the end of XVII – mid XIX centuries. The article determines the structure of the correlated with the mentioned sphere German vocabulary during mentioned period. The article specifies the peculiarities of the analyzed terminology caused by both general trends in the development of the German language in the period of formation of the national norms of word usage (presence of a large number of synonymous and double-headed designations) and the specifics of folding of the lexicon of the financial and credit sphere (preservation of naming units of dying concepts, functioning of intermediate lexemes). The research allows us to state that at the current stage of credit terminology development the special dictionary is replenished in the course of lexical borrowing processes from such Western European languages as Italian and French. As for the intra-linguistic word-production of credit nominations, it took place mainly on the basis of word-producing resources in the course of semantic and morphemic derivation, with the obvious prevalence of addition.