This paper presents distributions of topological observables in inclusive three- and four-jet events produced in pp collisions at a centre-of-mass energy of 7$$,\text {TeV}$$TeV with a data sample collected by the CMS experiment corresponding to a luminosity of 5.1$$,\text {fb}^{-1}$$fb-1. The distributions are corrected for detector effects, and compared with several event generators based on two- and multi-parton matrix elements at leading order. Among the considered calculations, MadGraph interfaced with pythia6 displays the overall best agreement withdata.