The invention discloses a synonym expansion method and a synonym expansion device both used for text duplication detection, which include a text preprocessing unit used for deleting stop words in a suspected text and tagging the part-of-speech, wherein verbs, nouns, and adjectives are taken as the to-be-processed objects; through retrieving synonyms of single words, computing the Cartesian product and obtaining the initial expansion set of all word collocations in the suspected text; through comparing the initial expansion set and an actual corpus, filtering word collocations impossible in an actual language environment, simplifying the set, and obtaining the final expansion set; and during the duplication detection, according to different collocation results, giving the words different weights which are taken as the computation base for the duplication detection results. Through applying the method or the device disclosed by the embodiment of the invention, the problem of synonym replacement in text duplication can be efficiently overcome, the efficiency is higher, and the accuracy of the duplication detection is greatly improved.