Abstract: The development of Chinese vocabulary has gone through four stages:the stage of monosemic words,the stage of polysemous words,the stage of derivational words and the stage of disyllabic words.From monosemic words to polysemous words,there are three main ways of evolution:word meaning segregation,word meaning transplantation and word meaning extension.The word meaning segregation refers to the division of one meaning into two in the process of words meaning evolution.The word meaning transplantation is described as transplanting new meanings into old words based on common characteristics or mutual association.The word meaning extension means that words extend new meanings under the influence of collocation words during their usage.The way of development from polysemous words to derivational words is mainly based on phonetic derivation and glyph derivation.The phonetic derivation just means the fact that the original words derive new words through changing some syllabic phonemes of the original words.Glyph derivation could be divided into two categories:inheritance relation in glyph and no inheritance relation in glyph.

Key words: development history of Chinese vocabulary, words in unearthed documents, the development history of Chinese characters