English is widely considered to be rich in near-synonyms of Germanic and Latin-Romance origins. It implies that EFL learners may find it very challenging to recognize the subtle nuances of the synonymous words. This study aims to explore the similarities and differences in meaning and usage of two near-synonyms, entire and whole, for EFL learners to avoid potential sources of errors. To get this goal, this study 1) surveys 82 Korean college students to examine the recognition of the two adjectives; 2) shows the stylistic and diachronic variation through BNC and COHA respectively; 3) summarizes the dictionary definitions retrieved from three online dictionaries and applies them to the extracted instances from BNC; 4) extracts 200 noun collocates (MI>3) from BNC and analyzes them using Wmatrix program to sort their semantic categories. The findings of this study clearly illustrate remarkable differences in meaning and usage of two near-synonyms. They indicate that utilizing the semantic categories extracted from Wmatrix program is very useful to clarify the subtle meaning differences between two near-synonyms and enhance the learning of lexicon.