The present invention provides a transmission method and a terminal. The method includes: using at least one reference signal port among N reference signal ports to transmit a reference signal; the reference signal is generated by modulating a reference signal sequence through at least one of the following modulation methods: the first Type I modulation, first orthogonal superposition code modulation, discrete Fourier transform modulation, frequency domain filtering, second orthogonal superposition code modulation, inverse fast Fourier transform modulation, wherein N is an integer greater than 1. The PAPR of the reference signal transmitted by the present invention is relatively low, so that the power amplifier efficiency of the signal transmitting end can be improved, the power consumption can be reduced, the demodulation performance of the signal receiving end can be improved, and the uplink coverage can be improved.