One of the most significant services provided by cloud computing is now cloud storage, from which its consumers have reaped numerous benefits. Users can easily use public-key encoding and keyword searching to search secured data and retrieve desired data from cloud storage. However, there were some problems with speed, accuracy, and security when searching for encrypted keywords. The cross-lingual multi-keyword Centroid Merkle search over encrypted data (CLCMSE) suggested in this study is based on the Open Multilingual Wordnet and is meant to solve this problem. The proposed CLCMSE technique allows data users to query in any language and select the linguistic kind of information provided. First, the Centroid technique is used to cluster data from the cloud and sort the clustered data in this process. Then the Merkle search technique is used to increase the search speed. Finally, the targeted source data is retrieved from the cloud by using the fuzzy information retrieval algorithm. This experimental result proved that our proposed CLCMSE has higher accuracy, security, and speed performance than existing methods. This study compares the multi-keyword rank search over encrypted cloud data, the multi-keyword rank searchable encryption, and the verifiable attribute multi-keyword search. © 2024 Elsevier B.V., All rights reserved.