PURPOSE: To facilitate recognizing characters, by checking degrees of resemblance to an input character and selecting the same character categories in accordance with probability and displaying plural candidate categories and inputting a correct character category as a character code by the indication of the operator.

CONSTITUTION: A character of a document is scanned optically in a character recognizing part 1 under the control of a controlling part 3, and a quantized pattern obtained by scanning is collated with preliminarily registered standard patterns with category names to obtain degrees of resemblance, and less than N number of category names where degrees of resemblance to the quantized pattern are a certain value or above are selected. These selected category names are displayed as a candidate category name list on a display part 4 through a signal line 11. A candidate category name displayed on the display part 4 is converted to a character code in accordance with the indication of the operator through an indicating part 5 consisting of a keyboard or a light pen and is outputted from a signal line 40.