The contributions provide new insights into the largely unexplored word formation system of Middle High German. Using the methods of historical-synchronous word formation analysis, nominal derivation (noun suffixation, adjective suffixation/prefixation) is examined based on the corpus of Old German original documents. The systematically recorded derivations are analyzed morphologically and semantically-functionally, taking into account their linguistic geographical distribution. This results in an exemplary representation of the word formation system of the German documentary language of the 13th century. The findings are presented in a morphological-semasiological section and an onomasiological section. The synchronous analysis is complemented by a diachronic contextualization of the findings, which arises from a comparison with the systems of later language stages.