The main purpose of this paper is to study the differences in use between the English adjectival synonyms distant and remote through COCA(The Corpus of Contemporary American English), and to assess Korean college students’ understanding of distant/remote+noun combinations. The major findings of the paper are summarized as follows. First, The adjective distant is mostly used with space/place nouns, while remote is mainly used with information/communication/ computer-related or abstract nouns. Second, according to nouns which they occur together with, the two adjectives sometimes have (almost) the same meaning (e.g. distant/remote island), and sometimes a considerably different meaning (e.g. distant/remote office). Third, the same noun is sometimes used in different meanings (e.g. distant/remote connection), depending on whether it is used with which one of the two adjectives. Fourth, the overall average score of the subjects was as low as 45.2%, and the average score by type was 62.6%(remote+noun), 56.6%(distant+noun), and 16.4% (distant-remote+noun).