Mapping the mental lexicon

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.

In contrast to a thesaurus or dictionary, we use word associations to learn about what words mean and which ones are central in the human mind. This enables psychologists, linguists, neuro-scientists and others to test new theories about how we represent and process language. This knowledge could also be applied in a variety of ways, from learning about the difference between cultures, to learning (or forgetting) new words in a first or a second language.