This paper investigates the compounding propensity in Maritime English under the theoretical framework of Synergetic Linguistics. It focuses on the dependence of compound number on the properties of length, frequency and polylexy of word stems. A maritime English corpus was used and a set of Visual Foxpro programs were specifically written for processing the corpus and obtaining the data automatically. The results confirm the respective hypotheses of dependence and show that the more frequent and polysemous a word stem is, the more compounds it produces, but the shorter a word stem is, the more frequently it occurs in compounds. The Köhler's model y=αχb captures this propensity.