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This paper aims to investigate the stress patterns of compound nouns in English, comparing them with noun phrases, and to attempt to analyze the stress patterns by using the framework of Optimality Theory. We review the previous analyses of the stress patterns and account for irregular patterns as well as regular ones in a more formal way. Traditionally, compound nouns have been assigned fore-stress while noun phrases have been assigned end-stress. Noun plus noun combinations in English such as bállroom, cónfidence man, and cábdriver usually have fore-stress, but there is some variation in their stress patterns, as shown in such examples as Madison Ávenue, silk shírt, and singer-sóngwriter. Giegerich (2006, 2009) attempts to account for them from various perspectives. On the basis of various factors such as syntactic category/structure, semantic transparency, markedness, etc., we have proposed seven constraints and their hierarchy―*[A/NŃ]CN, *[Á/ŃN]NP, *[NŃum], *[ŃNm] >> *[Arg-Héad], *[Mód/Áttr-Head] >> *[NŃ] and analyzed the stress patterns.