There is great theoretical and applied interest in understanding the psychology of risk-but what are defining features of lay people's semantic representation of this concept? We contribute a new approach to mapping the semantics of risk based on word associations that promises to provide insight into individual and group differences. Specifically, we introduce a novel mini-snowball word-association paradigm and use the tools of network and sentiment analysis to characterize the semantics of" risk" from 1,205 respondents (age range= 18-86; 50\% female). We find that association-based representations extend those extracted from past survey-and text-based approaches to the semantics of risk. Crucially, we show that the semantics of risk vary systematically across demographic groups, with older and female respondents showing more negative connotations and mentioning more often certain types of activities (eg, recreational activities) relative to younger adults and males, respectively. Our work has implications for the measurement of risk-related constructs by suggesting that" risk" means different things to different individuals.