Abstract: How to define a Chinese word has long been a big and difficult issue which relates to how to distinguish between morpheme and word and how to distinguish between word and phrase. This paper maintains that the Lexical Integrity Hypothesis cannot indeed solve the issue of how to define a Chinese compound word. It proposes that the essence of word-formation is naming. A comprehensive standard is put forward to identify a Chinese compound word in this paper. It includes some necessary conditions and a dispensable condition. The necessary conditions are the components of words, the number of syllables and semantic features of words respectively. The components of a Chinese word must be generic morphemes. The number of syllables in a Chinese word must be two or three and the meaning of a Chinese word must be idiocratic. The dispensable condition demands that the word endings must be unstressed syllables.