Аннотация:The article contains an analysis of selected Gothic and Old Frisian compounds, mostly nouns, belonging to several basic semantic fields – namely kinship terms, representatives of authority, parts of the body and law of crimes terms. Despite the stylistic differences between the source texts, there are morphological commonalities, e.g. the [noun + noun] structure to be prevailing.
A number of poetic means are used in the analysed compounds to emphasize their idiomatic nature.
Thus, in terms of compounding, use of poetic means can be considered as a tool of building idiomatic units, subsequently used within a terminological system.