Changing the Rewordifying Level

What's a Rewordifying Level?

That term describes how much or how little the site simplifies text. It starts at Easiest, then goes through Level 1 (the default), all the way up to Hardest.

Is the site rewording a lot of words you already know? Increase the Rewordifying Level. Are there too many hard words? Decrease the level.

Difficulty Levels

• Easiest: You get short definitions (that may omit some meaning from the original), and all difficult words are reworded. It's for making text as easy as possible to read.
• Level 1: (Default level.) You get descriptive definitions (that try to preserve the meaning of the original), and all difficult words are reworded. It's for making text easy to read and building vocabulary.
• Level 2: You get descriptive definitions, and most difficult words are reworded. It's for readers that find Level 1 to reword too many words.
• Level 3: You get descriptive definitions, and only somewhat harder words are reworded. It's for readers that need less support than Level 2.
• Level 4: You get descriptive definitions, and less vocabulary support than Level 3. It's for readers that find Level 3 to reword too many words.
• Hardest: The least level of support; only truly difficult words are reworded. It's for the strongest readers.

The site determines how difficult or easy a word is based on how often it shows up in the corpus we use of 450 million words of real-world written and spoken English.

For example, the word anxiety is only reworded on Easiest and Level 1. If you select Level 2, that word is left as-is, because it's seen often enough so that it doesn't meet the difficulty threshold of Level 2.

But, the word ominously is seen much less often in real-world writing than anxiety. So, ominously is reworded up to Level 4, but it's left as-is when you select Hardest.

Finally, a word like amelioration, which is rarely seen in real-world writing, is reworded on all levels—even the Hardest setting.

Short versus desriptive definitions

The Easiest level gives definitions that are as short as possible: for example, the word manga is reworded to picture books.

The remainder of the settings give definitions that are more descriptive, but that have more words. For example, the word manga is reworded to Japanese picture-based book(s).

Rewordify.com cannot read or understand

This site simplifies over 50,000 hard words and phrases, but like any computer, it has limits on what it can do.

Rewordify.com cannot rewrite text so that it targets a particular grade level.

Please don't expect it to be able to replace the wisdom and experience of a person.

Rewordify.com cannot help with basic reading skills by taking text and providing completely re-written, graded versions of that text. That requires a human being, which is good news for teachers ;-)

No computer can:

• Break long, complex sentences into shorter, simpler ones
• Understand literary devices like metaphor, irony, and symbolism, and re-write passages so they're easier to understand.
• Simplify text targeted for middle-school students and younger that already uses mostly high-frequency words
• Clarify vague, ambiguous, or poorly-worded text

This site helps the most when it's used by people who already have basic English reading skills, and who want an alternative way to improve vocabulary and understand text that contains many difficult words.