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

Difficulty is a pretty amorphus concept. If you've no clear idea of what you want, perhaps you could take a look at the Porter Stemming Algorithm (see for example the original paper). That contains a more advanced idea of 'length' by defining words as being of the form [C](VC){m}[V]; C means a block of consonants and V a block of vowels and this definition says a word is an optional C followed by m VC blocks and finally an optional V. The m value is this advanced 'length'.