The article analyzes monolexemic and polylexemic terms of decorative and applied arts, which represent a unique form of artistic creativity that combines functionality and aesthetics. Its main distinction from visual arts lies not only in the aesthetic appeal of an object but also in its practical use. However, despite the prevalence of decorative applied arts, there is an acute shortage of scientific works devoted to comprehensive research on the lexical units of art studies. The aim of our research is to analyze onecomponent and multicomponent English terms in decorative applied arts and select their Russian translation equivalences. R. Rosenthal’s and H. Ratzka’s book “The Story of Modern Applied Art” served as background material for our study. Although this work is not classified as a new textbook, it holds a special place in art studies as it describes the main stages of the art development. Additionally, it contains specific vocabulary characteristic of that time, reflecting cultural, historical and social aspects of the period during which they emerged. The scientific novelty of the article is determined by the given research vector, namely a comparative analysis of art history terms using a continuous sampling method. As a result of research, we have identified the most productive syntactic models for the formation of polylexemic terms in accordance with the norms of the original language and the adequacy of their translation into Russian.