In this article particular emphasis is laid on the compounds which constitute parts of the titles of the press articles which were published in the online version of the Süddeutsche Zeitung newspaper between 1 August 2016 and 31 October 2016. The examples selected from the author’s research corpus make it possible to state that title is the kind of text which is highly open to word games and linguistic puns. The research conducted demonstrates and explains the role that compounds – especially occasionalisms which are parts of the press article titles under analysis – play in terms of assigning functional tasks to the given press titles (headlines). The research corpus gathered for the purpose of the analysis in the present article, i.e. selected press article titles, serves as a means of describing not only general linguistic traits of the said titles from the semantic and syntactic point of view, but also, and to an even larger extent, their sociolinguistic, i.e. pragmatic functions. Particular atten-tion is drawn to the role of compounds in performing the communicative function assigned to press article titles.