Is there a way to rank the difficulty of pronunciation of a word?

Question

I'm trying to build a collection English words that are difficult to pronounce.

I was wondering if there is an algorithm of some kind or a theory, that can be used to show how difficult a word is to pronounce.

Does this appear to you as something that can be computed?

As this seems to be a very subjective thing, let me make it more objective, let's say hardest words to pronounce by text to speech technologies.

Answer 1

One approach would be to build a list with two versions of each word. One the correct spelling, and the other being the word spelled using the simplest of phonetic spelling. Apply a distance function on the two words (like Levenshtein distance http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levenshtein_distance). The greater the distance between the two words, the harder the word would be to pronounce.

Answer 2

Great problem! Off the top of my head you could create a system which contains all the letters from the phonetic alphabet and with connected weights betweens every combination based on difficulty (highly specific so may need multiple people testing and take averages etc) then have a list of all words from the English dictionary stored on disk and call a script which cycles through each entry and performs web scraping on wikipedia for the phonetic spelling and ranks their difficulty. This could take into consideration the length of the word as well as the difficulty between joining phonetics then order the list based on the difficulty.

Thats what I would try and do :P