Abstract: English words and Chinese words are rarely the same in lexical meaning.While they are similar in conceptual meanings,they may differ in associative meanings.We should strengthen the study of associative meaning when emphasizing the study of conceptual meaning in order to completely and accurately understand lexical meaning. This paper makes a contrastive study of lexical meaning from the following four perspectives:(1)words with the same conceptual meaning, but different or opposite associative meaning,(2)words with the same conceptual meaning and the partially same associative meaning,(3)words with the same conceptual meaning,rich associative meaning in one language and none in another,(4)unique words in their own cultures, i.e.lexical gap.