Abstract: The Chinese characters shen and ti are both noun morphemes. They have the same referentiality and word formation. However there are some differences in semantics and collocation in practice. By analyzing the glyphs and meaning entries of shen and ti, we can see that shen emphasizes the subjectivity of people or objects, while ti highlights the external characteristics or internal structure of things. The differences in semantic features lead to different semantic development paths of the two morphemes.