The invention discloses a method and a device for full-wave-shape inversion based on a time domain-step velocity-stress elastic wave equation, wherein the method includes: adopting an adjoint method based on the perturbation theory, and confirming the adjoint equation of the time domain-step velocity-stress elastic wave equation and a corresponding gradient expression, in regard to model parameters, of an objective functional; conforming a forward-propagating wave field according to the time domain-step velocity-stress elastic wave equation, and conforming an inverse time extrapolation adjoint wave field according to the adjoint equation; confirming the gradient, in regard to the model parameters, of the objective functional according to the forward-propagating wave field, the inverse time extrapolation adjoint wave field and the gradient expression; and using a gradient iterative algorithm to carry out multi-scale full-wave-shape inversion. According to the method for the full-wave-shape inversion, before transmitted in an inverse-time mode, a wave field residual error does not need pretreatment, the conversion problems of particle velocity and particle displacement do not need to be considered, and inversion calculation efficiency can be improved.