Finding a definition of compoundhood that is cross-lingually valid is a non-trivial task as shown by linguistic literature. We present an iterative method for defining and extracting English noun compounds in a multilingual setting. We show how linguistic criteria can be used to extract compounds automatically and vice versa how the results of this extraction can shed new lights on linguistic theories about compounding. The extracted compound nouns and their multilingual contexts are a rich source that serves several purposes. In an additional case study we show how the database serves to predict the internal structure of tripartite noun compounds using spelling variations across languages, which leads to a precision of over 91%.

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