The study analyzes, for readability and difficulty, the language of 50 commonly used application forms. The forms were compared with respect to length, readability, t-unit density, and word-length variables. Forms were also compared against two word-frequency lists. Results show that many of the words appearing often on forms do not appear on the high-frequency word lists, that the readability of the forms (according to the FORCAST formula) ranges from the eighth-grade level to above the sixteenth-grade level, and that the language of forms combines difficult semantics with oversimplistic syntax. (Author/RL)