The processing and representation of multiword expressions (MWEs), rangingfrom noun compounds (such asnicknamein English andOhrwurmin German) tocomplex verbs (such asgive upin English andaufgebenin German) and idiomaticexpressions (such asbreak the icein English anddas Eis brechenin German) haveremained an unsettled issue over the past 20+ years.Our research question concerns semantically transparent MWEs as well asMWEs that result in a meaning shift. For example, in the absence of situationalexperience, even complex verbs that appear to be fully semantically transpar-ent such asaufstehen(‘stand up’) do not necessarily have whole-word meaningsthat are easily predictable from their constituents. Even more difficult are com-plex verbs such asverstehen(‘understand’) andzustehen(‘legally due’), whichcontain only a remote resemblance to the meaning ofstehen(‘stand’). Similarly,the constituents of noun compounds do not necessarily contribute to their whole-word meanings in a straightforward way. The meaning contribution may rangefrom relatively semantically transparent as inNudelsuppe(‘noodle soup’) to se-mantically opaque, as inSpitzname(‘nickname’, lit. ‘pointy name’),Geduldsfaden(‘patience’, lit. ‘patience thread’), orZwickmühle(‘dilemma’, lit. ‘pinch mill’),which contain a modifier (i.e. the left constituent) and/or a head (i.e. the right constituent) that render the compound semantically more opaque. The most ex-treme meaning shifts across types of MWEs occur in idiomatic constructions,such askick the bucketandreach for the stars, where the literal meanings of theconstituents do not seem to contribute to the overall figurative meanings ‘die’and ‘strive for something unachievable’ at all. MWEs of the idiomatic type aretypically assumed to be semantically opaque, even though some idioms likespillthe beansare stronger in reflecting the figurative meaning (‘reveal a secret’) in ametaphoric way than others.This edited volume exploits complementary evidence across different types ofMWEs to shed light on the interaction of constituent properties and meaningsof MWEs. Specialists across languages and across research disciplines contributeto this issue and provide a cross-linguistic perspective integrating linguistic, psy-cholinguistic, corpus-based and computational studies.