The relevance of the article is justified by the fact that answering the question on typical ways of expressing connotation in borrowed words and their connection with the history and ethnos development the presented article fills the research gap in linguistics. The objective of the article is to summarize the comparative study of semantic (primarily connotative) evolution of two words ‘orda’ (Mongolian ‘ordu’ Knan’s palace, headquarters) – ‘ulus’ borrowed from Mongolian. The principal method of the research involves semantic context analysis. The analysis consists of 3 stages. At the first stage the semantic analysis of the words in Russian National Corpus, precedent texts (proverbs, idioms, popular quotations etc.) and modern Russian dictionaries reveals the fixed connotations in the language and brings out stereotypical images in the Russian culture. The second stage focuses on Russians’ individual perceptions of the words and summarizes the results of an associative experiment – respondents’ reactions to the stimulus ‘orda’, ‘ulus’. Thirdly, the semantic network analysis of the words performed on modern social media texts (chats and forums) reveals the typical semantic context of the words represented by collocations. Based on the principles of explanation, expansionism, functionalism and anthropocentrism as the main principles of modern linguistics paradigm the article might be of interest to linguists pursing research in semantics, students majoring in Linguistics and Cultural studies and teachers of Russian.