PURPOSE: To perform postprocessing with less erroneous conversion by giving a candidate character output from a recognition part a value which corresponds to its recognized distance and thus finding mathcing with a word dictionary, and obtaining a word matched with the shrotest distance.

CONSTITUTION: A recognition part 10 observes an input character to extract features of the input character pattern, and then finding the distance to a standard pattern character to output patterns with the shortest distance together with the value of the distance. Then, a word matching part 15 compares plural candiate characters, outputted from a discrimination part 14, with words in a word dictionary 16 registered previously, and then outputs the distance of coincident canditate characters. A decision part 17 selects one of words, outputted from the part 15, which has the shortest-distance value among values given to the respective characters.