The author presents general conclusions concerning lexical basis of the 16th century Polish excerpted from the published volumes and the card index of 'The 16th Century Polish Dictionary'. The idea was to juxtapose, with the aid of statistics, two types of relations between lexical and word-building systems: lexical and word-building items rated among 'nomina instrumenti' word-building category. He proves that in this case there is no point in considering the activity of some suffixes, but to study the activity of word-building categories and semantic categories of names of tools, because, as calculation shows, the number of derivates is nearly equal to non-derived names of tools.