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This paper focuses on English compound stress assignment within the frameworks of Optimality Theory. Optimality Theory provides a very natural way of capturing the surface well-formedness with universal constraints and their ranking based on the requirements of a particular language. The previous research to stressing English compounds has adopted the rule-based approaches as in SPE and Metrical Phonology, both of which failed to explain the diversity of stress assignments in English. There are various types of compounds in English: endocentric compounds, exocentric compounds, co-compounds, subcompounds, synthetic compounds, etc, all of which show different stress patterns. First, exocentric compounds unexceptionally have forestress, which means that the first element of a compound has the most prominent stress. On the other hand, co-compounds have afterstress without exception. Subcompounds and synthetic compounds, in which most English compounds consist, usually have forestress, which is regarded as a default and to which L-PROM is applied. However, if there are certain semantic relations between the two compound elements, the stress patterns vary. Specifically, if the first element functions as duration, place, material, attribute or modifier to the second element, the most prominent stress goes to the second element. Hence, a new constraint is introduced: NOPROM(Adjunct). If a compound itself is a proper noun, it usually has afterstress. Therefore, another constraint is introduced: R-PROM(ProperN). For some compounds which are proper nouns but show exceptional stress patterns, another constraint is introduced: NOPROM(LexicalE). To conclude, this paper shows that the constraints which interact in assigning English compound stress are CULMIN, NOPROM(Adjunct), NOPROM(LexicalE), R-PROM(ProperN) and L-PROM, and it also reveals that the constraint ranking for English compound stress assignment is [CULMIN, NOPROM(Adjunct), NOPROM(LexicalE) ≫ R-PROM(ProperN) ≫ L-PROM]. Therefore, the analysis results imply that it is possible to explain the majority of phenomena in English compound stress assignment.