There can hardly be the term of ‘noun’ in the Salish languages. The Salishists call it ‘nominal’ because of the verbal character of roots denoting entities. In fact the majority of nominals are intransitive verb-like roots in Salish languages. Our research of the etymology of nominals while studying the dictionaries of Salish languages confirms the fact. The aim of the research was a synchro-dicachronic analysis of Salish texts as far as the expressions of the nominals are concerned and the etymological analysis of the nominals in the dictionaries of the Salish languages. For a native speaker of an Indo-European language it is hard to realize that the lexeme ‘mother’ or ‘foot, leg’ may be verb-like, but in fact they are: 1) Kalispel s-m-Ɂem nominalizer (prefix)-middle (suffix)-feed (root) ‘woman (wife)’. 2) Squamish s-xənɁ nominalizer (prefix)-read or tell one’s family tree (root) ‘foot, leg’. In fact we observe the process of morphological formation of the former verbal roots into nominlas by means of the prefix s-, which indicates that a situation or state is to be viewed as an entity. Due to the material of the Interior Salish languages we can trace that the nominals are in fact former subordinate clauses attached to verbs. The syncretic nature of the prefix s- as an aspectual marker and as a nominalizer can prove the fact as far as we can observe ‘the intermediate’ structures - nominalized clauses where the prefix s- is a marker of a neutral mode. 3) Coeur'd Alene s-Ɂel-min-t-sut-s nominalizer (prefix)-move.body-relational-transitive-reflexive-3sg ‘he moved (he did not even move) ‘he died’. So the Salish languages provide the evidence for us that the category of the ‘noun’ is of verbal origin that could be characteristic of the ancient language.