While it is generally agreed that higher education is a public good and produces public goods, it remains unclear what this means. An important reason for the unclarity is the conceptual ambiguity and cultural nuances of the concept of the public good in higher education. Coupled with the Western dominance of discourse in higher education and language challenges in translation, the ambiguity and nuances further result in challenges for studies that explore and compare the public good of higher education across contexts. This paper employs a lexical comparison approach to address these challenges, all of which have been encountered by the comparative research project that leads to this Special Issue. Taking Japanese, Chinese and English as examples, it identifies key terms in the three languages, reveals contextual underpinnings of the key terms and the cultural distance between the terms, and discusses the implications of the lexical comparison. The paper argues that this lexical comparison has been effective in this particular analysis and the comparative research project, and has the potential to contribute to comparisons of other higher education topics involving multiple languages.