Determine the difficulty of an english word

Question

I am working a word based game. My word database contains around 10,000 english words (sorted alphabetically). I am planning to have 5 difficulty levels in the game. Level 1

Answer 1

Get a large corpus of texts (e.g. from the Gutenberg archives), do a straight frequency analysis, and eyeball the results. If they don't look satisfying, weight each text with its Flesch-Kincaid score and run the analysis again - words that show up frequently, but in "difficult" texts will get a score boost, which is what you want.

If all you have is 10000 words, though, it will probably be quicker to just do the frequency sorting as a first pass and then tweak the results by hand.