Abstract: This paper examines the phenomena of “Words with Borrowed Meanings” in contemporary Chinese with the aid of diachronic and synchronic corpora. The study reveals that meaning borrowing constantly occurs between “equivalents” of two languages and has its roots in the actual inequivalence between so-called “equivalents”. Besides, newly borrowed meanings are usually used in fixed collocations or contexts and seldom used independently. Newly borrowed meanings usually won't cause any problem in understanding, but new meanings with cultural and emotional connotations may sometimes lead to obstacles in borrowing and understanding.