Abstract Measuring the semantic meaning between words is an important issue because it is the basis for many applications, such as word sense disambiguation, document summarization, and so forth. Although it has been explored for several decades, most of the studies focus on improving the effectiveness of the problem, i.e., precision and recall. In this paper, we propose to address the ef?ciency issue, that given a collection of words, how to ef?ciently discover the top-k most semantic similar words to the query. This issue is very important for real applications yet the existing state-of-the-art strategies cannot satisfy users with reasonable performance. Ef?cient strategies on searching top-k semantic similar words are proposed. We provide an extensive comparative experimental evaluation demonstrating the advantages of the introduced strategies over the state-ofthe-art approaches.