In this work, a ceramic composite of ZrW 2 O 8 and ZrO 2 was synthesized, in order to investigate the possibility of compensating the positive thermal expansion of ZrO 2 with the negative thermal expansion (NTE) compound ZrW 2 O 8 , tailoring the thermal expansion of these composites. The NTE material was mixed with varying amounts of ZrO 2 . The thermal expansion coefficients of this series of composites decrease with increasing amounts of ZrW 2 O 8 . Nevertheless, a negative deviation from the values expected by the rule of mixtures was found to be most pronounced in the middle of the compositional region.