1. A word recognition method of performing recognition processing with respect to each word candidate obtained by reading characters in character information written in a reading material, comprising: a matching processing step of collating each word candidate with a plurality of words in a word dictionary and calculating, every word, a matching score indicative of a degree that each word candidate matches with a word; a character quality score calculating step of calculating a character quality score indicative of a degree that a character candidate constituting each word candidate matches with an arbitrary character; and a correcting step of correcting a matching score obtained at the matching processing step based on a character quality score acquired at the character quality score calculating step.