Verbs are not only the core of sentences, but also the focus of vocabulary research and teaching. This paper takes a commonly used verb xiàn ‘trap’ as an example to explore the use of verbs. This word is listed in The Chinese Proficiency Grading Standards for International Chinese Language Education, which has been newly implemented worldwide since 2021. This study has analyzed the syntactic use of xiàn ‘trap’ from the aspects of syntactic functions and intensity of syntactic collocations, as well as the semantic use of xiàn ‘trap’ from the aspect of its semantic roles. It combines quantitative statistics and qualitative analysis to explore the syntactic and semantic use, which not only deepens the linguistic research of verbs, but also provides reference for verb teaching in language education and the compilation of Chinese learners’ dictionaries.