English dictionaries usually provides only the senses of each word without explicitly showing the subtle nuances of the synonymous words. The great challenge in English language teaching is to distinguish the similarities and differences of near synonyms for EFL learners so that they will be able to understand and use the words correctly. This paper is intended to explore comprehensively the similarities and differences in meaning and usage of two near-synonyms, entire and whole through Wmatrix. This paper consists of 4 steps; administrating questionnaire to college students, analyzing BNC and COHA, applying the dictionary definitions to corpus data, and analyzing and sorting 200 noun collocates (MI>3) using Wmatrix web tool. The findings show that there are clear differences between two near-synonyms and that utilizing the semantic categories through Wmatrix can contribute to distinguishing and learning near-synonyms.