In English the word "touch" can not only mean the sense of touch, one of the five senses, but can also be used metaphorically to show the meaning of other domains. For example, in sentences such as "No one can touch him when it comes to interior design" and "His story touched us all deeply", the meanings of "touch" are no longer within the tactile domain. This phenomenon is what we call a "mapping" from a source domain to a target domain. However, this metaphorical use is so common that people

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... re hardly aware of it and it has become what is known as dead metaphor. This paper aims to briefly discuss the metaphorical use of the word "touch" in an attempt to uncover the working mechanism beneath this use and its function. Besides, women are often said to be sensory animals. This kind of saying, to a large degree, is intuitive. However, the BNC corpus can provide us with the situation of the metaphorical use of "touch" by women and men respectively. As touch is one of the five senses, we can thus examine if the intuition is true or not. The result of the examination shows that men tend to use metaphors of "touch" more frequently than women do. This paper can be seen as one more example of demonstrating how we human beings cognize the world and how the meaning of a word develops, and an examination of people's intuition about gender difference from the perspective of the situation of the metaphorical use of "touch".