In this paper, basic works were performed to systematically deal with the pattern of meaning changes in Korean vocabulary. First, several concepts for describing the change in lexical meanings were examined and our own views were presented. And ‘lexeme’, ‘meaning change’, and ‘meaning relationship’ were defined. Second, from the perspective of research methodology, existing studies on history of vocabulary were summarized and reviewed. Third, the distribution hypothesis-based research methodology(Word2vec), which recently began to be used in lexical research, was applied to studies of history of vocabulary. Through this, the significance and limitations of this research methodology could be examined.