Description The small world of words project is a large-scale scientific study that aims to build a mental dictionary or lexicon in the major languages of the world and make this information widely available. Word association and participant data for 100 primary, secondary and tertiary responses to 12,292 cues. The data published in Behavior Research Methods were collected between 2011 and 2018. The preprocessed data consist of normalizations of cues and responses by spell-checking them, correcting capitalization and Americanizing. In addition to normalizing cues and responses, the preprocessed file contains data in which each cue is judged by exactly 100 participants License The data are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. They cannot be redistributed or used for commercial purposes.