The article considers the formation of the individual author’s meaning of the lexeme “reverence” in the academic register of the Church Slavonic language of the second half of the 17th century. This register is characterized by an attitude towards language as an object of modeling, which in many ways determines the search by Epiphany Slavinetsky and Arseniy Satanovsky, translators of the text, for different translation strategies. In this case, the authors use the technique of creating a new meaning for a lexeme already existing in the linguistic arsenal – a technique that the tradition of describing the history of vocabulary allocates only for the language of the next century.