In this paper, we explore the embedding of the shortest-path metrics from a knowledge base (Wordnet) into the Hamming hypercube, in order to enhance the computation performance. We show that, although an isometric embedding is untractable, it is possible to achieve good non-isometric embeddings. We report a speedup of three orders of magnitude for the task of computing Leacock and Chodorow (LCH) similarities while keeping strong correlations (r = .819,  = .826).