PURPOSE: To recognize a character by combining a character similar to the character pattern-recognized with detected character information at every character string and deciding the character information.

CONSTITUTION: For the character information read by a scanning part 11, the character information is detected at every character string by a character detecting segmenting part 13. For the character information, a character recognizing part 14 refers to a pattern dictionary and a candidate character is selected. A knowledge processing part 16 reads the character similar to the candidate character from a code dictionary 17, combines the read similar character at every character string and compares it with the combining information to exist at a knowledge dictionary 18. The character, which is coincident as the result of comparison, is outputted as the deciding result and outputted as the recognizing result.