The purpose of this article is to study the semantic features of verbal nouns in closely related languages with identical structural and systemic organization, in particular, in German and Ossetian. In this work an attempt was made to consider the subject meanings of this type of nouns in two Indo-European languages based on the research of domestic and foreign linguists. The article reveals the process of transition of the verb to the category of a noun with the help of various word-formation means, and also considers the semantic properties of the emerging lexical units of the German and Ossetian languages. The empirical material of the study was: Ossetian-Russian dictionary by B.B. Bigulaev, large German- Russian dictionary by O.I. Moskalskaya and reverse dictionary by M.D. Stepanova. The main methods of the study were methods of linguistic description, component analysis, lexical-semantic analysis, as well as the method of comparative-contrastive analysis. The results of the conducted research revealed that verbal nouns (deverbatives) of the modern German and the Ossetian languages, preserving phonetic and semantic connections with the productive verbal base, acquire the function of a noun, i.e. possess semantic-morphological characteristics of both a noun and a verb. It was established that the methods of forming deverbatives in the German and the Ossetian languages coincide, mainly by suffixation. It was also revealed that verbal nouns in the studied languages are characterized by a close semantic connection with the motivating word. The theoretical and practical significance of the studied material is determined by the possibility of its inclusion in lecture courses on comparative linguistics, as well as on the theory of semantics of nouns.