The paper describes an ongoing experiment consisting in the attempt to quantify word-order proper- ties of three Indo-European languages (Czech, English and German). The statistics are collected from the syntacti- cally annotated treebanks available for all three languages. The treebanks are searched by means of a universal query tool PML-TQ. The search concentrates on the mutual or- der of a verb and its complements (subject, object(s)) and the statistics are calculated for all permutations of the three elements. The results for all three languages are compared and a measure expressing the degree of word order free- dom is suggested in the final section of the paper. This study constitutes a motivation for formal modeling of natural language processing methods.