This invention is applicable to the field of communications technologies, and provides a device to device (D2D) discovery method and a first D2D user equipment (UE). The method includes: the first D2D UE acquires timing information of the first D2D UE from a Lont Term Evolution (LTE) cellular communications system; receives in a discovery subframe, a device discovery signal from a second D2D UE according to the timing information, wherein the device discovery signal comprises a pilot orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) symbol and a device information OFDM symbol; acquires an arrival time of the device discovery signal by performing a time domain correlation of the pilot OFDM symbol of the device discovery signal and a local pilot sequence, acquires device information of the second D2D UE by parsing the device information OFDM symbol of the device discovery. This invention enables a D2D UE to effectively discover other D2D UEs, improves system efficiency, and saves power of the D2D UE.