The article examines onomastic writings, published in Virittäjä between 1897–2019, from a primarily methodological perspective. During this period, Virittäjä published nearly 500 onomastic writings, of which almost half, 232, are articles, review articles and lectures given at the public defences of doctoral dissertations. Here, these research papers are classified by their methods into seven groups. The classification is rough, and there is some overlap between the categories. Book reviews and congress reports have been taken into account, but they are not included in the calculations.Etymological research was prevalent throughout the period: over half of all ono-mastic papers published in the journal fall into this category. The next most popular methods are name typological analysis, socio-onomastic analysis and contact onomas-tics, each accounting for ca. 10% of all papers. Functional-semantic analysis and quan-titative corpus analysis are rarer occurrences; only 3–4% of all papers follow either of these methods. About 10% have been classified as multidisciplinary papers because they exploit non-linguistic methods in addition to onomastic methods.The writings in Virittäjä reflect the methodical development of Finnish onomastics. New methods always build on what has gone before: for instance, typological think-ing can already be observed in the early etymological papers, and socio- onomastic re-search arose from typological analysis. This being said, semantic and functional anal-ysis was a natural consequence of the typological studies of different nomenclatures, whereas corpus analysis evolved out of previous methods, particularly since the advent of new technological tools for analysing large quantities of data.