Compounds, especially in languages where compounds are formed by concatenation without intervening whitespace between elements, pose challenges to simple text retrieval algorithms. Search queries that include compounds may not retrieve texts where elements of those compounds occur in uncompounded form; search queries that lack compounds will not retrieve texts where the salient elements are buried inside compounds. This study explores the distributional characteristics of compounds and their constituent elements using Swedish, a compounding language, as a test case. The compounds studied are taken from experimental search topics given for CLEF, the Cross-Language Evaluation Forum and their distributions are related to relevance assessments made on the collection under study and evaluated in terms of divergence from expected random distribution over documents. The observations made have direct ramifications on e.g. query analysis and term weighting approaches in information retrieval system design.