The period from 1872 to 2015 marks significant linguistic change in China, with neologisms and phrases emerging in tandem with social transformations. Considering the substantial functional expansion of the Chinese language during this time, influenced by economic and political developments, we hypothesize that these changes facilitated the spread of new vocabulary into diverse contexts. Drawing on linguistic and historical perspectives, we examine vocabulary from the Shenbao and People’s Daily archives, focusing on neologisms identified using an overlapping background corpus method. Initially, we identify emerging vocabulary based on rates of change and employ multi-dimensional analysis to extract four lexical dimensions of neologisms, which we categorize as (1) economic, (2) political, (3) military, (4) law, (5) diplomacy and (6) education. The overall trend of neologisms shows a bell-curve pattern and new concept words play a dominant role in neologisms. Additionally, by analyzing the competitive relationship between the terms “laboratory testing” and “chemical feast”, we show the language evolution process in China when introducing and accepting scientific concepts. During this process, China gradually formed a terminology system with local characteristics.