The article defines the term “stable verb-nominal combinations”, provides criteria for the allocation of stable combinations, briefly describes the features of the language of official texts of the XVIII century. The results of the analysis of the use of verbal-nominal collocations with the components proizvodit'/proizvesti in the official texts of the XVIII century, collected in the Russian National Corpus, are presented. It is established that the most frequent combinations in these texts are proizvodit'/proizvestidejstvie, delo, kanonadu, ogon', pal'bu, nakazanie, stroenie, torg, rukodelie. It is proved that combinations with these verbs were used in the following meanings: ‘to carry out any activity/to perform actions without any specification’; ‘to open artillery fire/to fire shots from different types of weapons’; ‘to carry out specific activities’; ‘to punish/ ttack/ ause harm’. It was determined that the verbsproizvodit' / proizvestiat that time already had several meanings and wide compatibility, however, most of the analyzed collocations are not used in modern Russian, that is, these verbs have changed their compatibility while maintaining the lexical meaning. Such combinations as proizvodit'/proizvestidejstvie, kanonadu, ogon', pal'bucan be attributed to stable collocations.