Rare earth compound nanowires have currently attracted booming interests and become hotspot in diverse fields such as bioimaging and semiconductor devices. In this review, we primarily focus on recent progress in materials synthesis of rare earth compound nanowires. Many methods including template synthesis, hydrothermal method, high temperature organic solvents synthesis, electrospinning and chemical vapor deposition have been used to synthesize rare earth compound nanowires. Then, we further briefly review the phyciochemical properties and applications of rare earth compound nanowires in the past decades. The studies revealed that doping and shell encapsulation are efficient means to optimize the optical properties including emission wavelength and quantumn efficiency. These rare earth compound nanowires exhibit great potential in multimodal biological theranostics and future optoelectronic devices due to their abundant 4f electronic configurations resutled novel physicochemical properties.