The fundmental regularities of governing the optical absorption properties of glasses colored with Cd(S, Se, Te) have been investigated and summarized. Some new results are obtained. (1) The absorption edge of the glass agrees with the energy gap of the corresponding semiconductor, and their temperature coefficients have the same sign and similar values. (2) The absorption coefficient (α) depends exponentially on the photon energy (E) at different temperatures, and on the temperature (T) at constant value of the photon energy. The relationship among them may be written as an empirical formular α=α0exip(AE+BT), where α0, A and B are constants.