The invention relates to a method, device and terminal for detecting a long term evolution (LTE) master synchronizing signal. In the method, frequency shift range is divided into a plurality of branches, each branch corresponds to a frequency shift value, and each frequency shift value is attached to input time domain data by a coordinated rotation digital computer algorithm; the time domain data with frequency shift value is subjected to sampling point separation, and time domain data subjected to the sampling point separation is respectively subjected to time domain slippage correlation with three local characteristic sequences; power value calculation is carried out on the correlation results, and the separated sampling points with big power value are output so as to obtain multichannel frequency shift branch data; and the maximum value in peak values related to multichannel frequency shift branch data is acquired, the master synchronizing signal corresponding to the maximum value is the master synchronizing signal of the current cell, and the frequency shift value corresponding to the maximum value is an initial frequency shift estimation value. According to the invention, the detection success rate of a master synchronizing signal position is greatly improved, the range of detecting the frequency shift is enlarged, the system resources are reduced, and the implementation is convenient.