This paper focuses on relationships between vocabulary in mathematical tasks and aspects of reading and solving these tasks. The paper contains a framework that highlights a number of different aspects of word difficulty as well as many issues to consider when planning and implementing empirical studies concerning vocabulary in tasks, where the aspect of common/uncommon words is one important part. The paper also presents an empirical method where corpora are used to investigate issues of vocabulary in mathematical tasks. The results from the empirical study show that there are connections between different types of vocabulary and task difficulty, but that they seem to be mainly an effect of the total number of words in a task.