People say “it’s a small world” when they run into someone they know in an unlikely place, or discover that two strangers share a mutual friend or an odd point of connection. It is an exclamation of surprise at the coincidence, and often carries a slight sense of wonder that the world, for all its size, keeps turning out to be more tightly linked than expected. It can also be used more ruefully, as a reminder that people, gossip and reputations travel further than you might like.
What’s the origin of the phrase ‘its a small world’?
The phrase is bound up with the growth of travel itself. The kind of chance meeting it describes, an old acquaintance turning up somewhere far from home, only became notable once widespread travel and the transport to support it made such encounters possible in the first place. An early example of the sentiment appears in the travel writer George Augustus Sala’s 1886 book America Revisited, in which he wrote “Not such a large world after all” after unexpectedly meeting someone in San Francisco he had not seen for thirty-one years.
By the early twentieth century the exact wording “it’s a small world” was already worn smooth through overuse. George Ade, writing in his 1906 book In Pastures New, described it as “one of the most overworked phrases of the globe-trotter”, which shows the saying was already an established cliché of travellers by that date.
The phrase later found a second life outside travel writing altogether. In 1967 the psychologist Stanley Milgram used it in his Psychology Today article “The Small World Problem”, quoting a research subject who exclaimed “Good lord, it’s a small world, isn’t it?” on discovering an unexpected mutual acquaintance during Milgram’s studies of social networks.
Its best-known modern association is with the Disney song of the same name, written by the Sherman Brothers for the attraction that opened at the New York World’s Fair on 22 April 1964, sponsored by Pepsi with proceeds going to UNICEF. The song popularised the phrase enormously but did not originate it; by the time it was written, “it’s a small world” had already been in circulation, and already thought a cliché, for decades.