The paper focuses on the lexical structure of English terminological hierarchies and attempts to uncover the principles determining their formation, the sense relations between their component parts and their correspondence to analogous hierarchies in Czech and Latin. It may be assumed that scientific terminological hierarchies in different languages are very similar as far as their structure is concerned. The objective reality and relationships between concepts which they reflect are in principal identical. However, the morphological, lexical and onomatological properties of different languages influence strongly the consistency and transparency of lexical hierarchies. A comparison is made between the taxonomies and meronomies in natural (biology) and social sciences (economics), since their nomenclatures are highly fixed and efforts have been made to standardise the hierarchies internationally.