The article examines the semantic relationship between three homonymous IE roots *uerg- (‘to work, to do’, ‘to include’, ‘power, anger’) and three PSlav. roots *ćara (‘shell’, ‘magic’, ‘stroke, line’). All the IE roots can be derived from the meaning of ‘to turn, to surround’, while the PSlav. roots go back to *(s)ker- ‘to cut’. It is possible that (s)ker- is one of the variants *sek-/sek-/sek- with the meaning ‘to cut’. All the three roots can be built from *se-/se-, synchronically ‘to cut / to connect / to bend’, with the help of the determinatives k.