Prepositions are frequently used in English and are key issues for English learners, teachers and researchers.The corpus-based approach has been widely adopted in linguistic study and has been gradually effective.Based on COCA, this paper focuses on the study of the use and distribution of the preposition “over”, and it reveals that among the top 30 verb and noun collocations with “over”, the semantic meanings of this preposition could be classified into 12 categories.Among them, non-spatial metaphoric meanings are more frequent than that of spatial meanings.In spatial meanings, the proportion of semantic item“covering something or pervading in some place”is the highest.In terms of non-spatial metaphoric meanings, the semantic item“somebody has control, authority, priority, or responsibility on somebody or something”and“during a process”are respectively of the highest proportion.The research findings will benefit English learners, teachers and researchers.