The meanings of words depend on the way they pattern into pharses and sentences and how they are used in situational contexts, the development of a theory of meaning being the central programme of ’corpus semantics’. The meaning relations between the terms in grammatical constructions is as interesting  as useful to study in foreign language teaching , so much the more as the surface structure can be misleading. Due to the difficulties and misunderstandings brought about by the English confusables (troublesome words) in text analysis, translation practice and oral interpreting , some lexical items (confusables) are analysed in this paper. We consider such an analysis very useful since confusables are sources of semantic ambiguity and translation traps.