PURPOSE: To provide a character recognizing device which takes picture data, which includes a character group having a prescribed meaning where at least two characters are arranged in a prerilinarily determined area for one character, as the input and recognizes each character in this character group in the same manner as normal characters.

CONSTITUTION: A character recognizing device 20 is provided with a pattern storage part D1 where character group paterns and standard character patterns are stored with correspondence between their features, and a recognizing part 3 retrieves the storage part D1 based on extracted features of a character group segmented by a segmenting part 1 if the character group is included in given picture data. When the pertinent character pattern is found, a intra- group character segmenting part 5 segments each character of the segmented character group, and a feature extracting part 2 and the recognizing part 3 recognize each segmented character while retrieving the storage part D1 again.