Abstract: A method for organizing a dictionary look up process in an Optical Character Recognition (OCR) system is described. Word length and an additional relative position within the words of a graphical feature, for example a stem, ascender, descender etc. are used in combination to index a dictionary. Unrecognized characters are analysed the same way, i.e. word length and relative position within the unrecognized word is then used to address the dictionary, resulting in an output of one ore more candidate words as an identification of the unrecognized word. An iterative process may reduce the number of candidate words identified in the dictionary look up process.