Olfactory perception is one of the most important stages of human consciousness in the development of the objective world. Currently, interest in the study of olfactory nominative space is increasing. At the same time, questions related to dynamic processes in the odoric subsystem remain open. Using the example of a derivative of the “smell” sphere word ‘vonyuchka’ (stench), the article examines the results of semantic variation reflecting trends in language development. The research material is based on modern contexts extracted from the National Corpus of the Russian language and Internet discourse, namely thematic forums devoted to discussing various aspects of human life and representing various types of texts and functional styles of speech behavior (including embodying the specifics of oral everyday communication). The leading research methods are descriptive, contextual, corpus analysis, lexicographic sources, and the method of component analysis. The article notes that the negative meaning of lexemes of the derivation group (stink, stench, smelly etc.) recorded in lexicographic sources determines the direction of their semantic development: figurative evaluative values are being updated, in which the perceptual seme can become the basis for the formation of an emotive assessment, be extinguished, transformed, or completely lost. Using the example of the word ‘vonyuchka’ (stench), the dependence of the nature of lexical and semantic variation on what this lexeme correlates with is with a conventionally objective world, the environment or a person. If a stench retains a nominative reference to a natural area, a subject area, then different semantic processes are observed:
1) preservation of the perceptual and negative-evaluative seme (‘about a bad-smelling object’), 2) neutralization of the negative evaluation of the smell (‘about an object emitting any smell’), 3) formation of a positive-evaluative seme (‘about a pleasantly smelling object’). In cases of nominating a person, the stench may lose perceptual signs and become an emotive-evaluative unit (for example, ‘about someone who transmits negative feelings to the outside’), while the range of evaluation may vary from disapproving to disparaging. Thus, words with the ‘smell’ meaning participate not only in the process of linguistic encoding of the situation of olfactory perception, but also act as an evaluative unit of mental, emotional, and behavioral characteristics of a person.