Is there a way to rank the difficulty of pronunciation of a word?
speech
Solution
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.
Problem
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.