Word building processes are highly common both in English and in German, which in fact share a common history. The two languages make extensive use of various word building processes to enrich their vocabularies. However, despite the certain similarities between the two languages analyzed in this paper, their different paths of evolution, and implicitly the various lexical influences exerted upon them along time, have determined distinctive features when it comes to the process of word building. Therefore, this paper intends to present a contrastive analysis between the various means of word formation in English and German, supported by examples for each of the processes analyzed.