PURPOSE: To improve the efficiency of correcting operability, by registering a pair of a character, which is rejected in an optical character reader, and its features in an auxiliary dictionary and discriminating succeeding reject characters again.

CONSTITUTION: Characters on a form are quantized by a reading part 1 and are sent to a recognizing part 3 one by one, and each character is compared with contents of a dictionary 2; and if it is not rejected, it is sent to a display part 6 and is displayed and stored. If the character is rejected, it is compared with contents of an auxiliary dictionary 4; and if it is not rejected, it is sent to the display part 6 and is displayed and stored. If the character is rejected as the result of comparison with contents of the dictionary 4, a pair of features of this character and the reject code is registered in the auxiliary dictionary 4 and is sent to the display part 6. These pairs are registered in an auxiliary storage part 5 each time the discrimination of characters of one form is terminated. A controlling part 7 reads data for one form from the auxiliary storage part 5 and displays this data on the part 6 and retrieves reject codes. A correct category name is inputted to the position indicated by a cursor by a keyboard 8. Thus, the correcting work is performed efficiently.