Abstract: The speech recognition system disclosed herein operates to select, from a collection of tokens which represent vocabulary words, those tokens which most closely match an unknown spoken word. The collection of tokens is divided into partitions, each of which is characterized or identified by a representative one of the tokens. Both the tokens and the unknown speech word are represented by a sequence of standard data frames which may, for example, define characteristic spectra. In operation, the system computes the distance from the unknown to each of the representative tokens and then, starting with the partition having the nearest representative token and proceeding through partitions represented by successively more distant tokens, examines the other tokens in that partition while keeping a list of predetermined length identifying the examined tokens which thus far provide the best match. This process is continued until the number of distance calculations performed reaches a preselected level.