The Word Analyzer provides meta information about a given word, such audience familiarity, to get you insight into how use of the word may affect readability metrics. The analyzer then shows synonyms and related words your audience may be more familiar with.
Determining Word Rank The word rank metric is a measure of word frequency, with frequent words corresponding to higher ranks. In order to get an accurate frequency count of each word, we utilize a stemmer to identify the morphological root form of a word. This allows us to group slight variations of the same word. For example, 'cats' and 'cat' both have the same stem, as do 'readability' and 'readable.' For most words, familiarity with said word is independent of count (e.g. the singular form vs the plural form) or part of speech (e.g. adjective form vs the noun form). In some rare cases, however, a common word may have multiple meanings including a meaning so infrequent it is not well known. We then calculate word frequency using the data from Project Gutenberg which is a large collection of freely available english documents and summing the counts for all variations of the word corresponding to the same stem.
Definitions Definitions of each word are generating using the Pearson's developer API.
Interested in readability? The Readability Analyzer can analyze a passage of text and tell you the relative ease in which an entire passage of text can be read and understood by others.