Synthetic compounds like “Busfahrer”, “trasporto merci” and “meat-eater” have not been analysed in contrastive studies but primarily in monolingual works. The lack of contrastive analysis, which take into consideration three or more languages, is evident not only from an academic perspective but also from a didactic perspective. There is a need for multilingual studies in order to avoid the risk of polar comparisons and to improve the didactic of foreign languages. Synthetic compounds are an appropriate field to apply multilingual research to, involving German, Italian and English, where they are present with terminological and categorization distinctions as well as structural differences. In my paper, I compare the status of these constructions in the three languages and I review traditional categorizations with the aim to find a systematization “super partes”, which can be adopted in contrastive German – Italian – English research. In the second step, I propose the analysis of synthetic compounds according to a word-based model approach and to morphological correspondences between words in the lexicon. I assume that the lexicon does not consist of morphemes, but it is composed of entire words and word schemas. The model accounts for compounds with the same criteria in the three languages.