1. A word recognition device recognizing a word image, comprising: a capacity reducing unit reducing a capacity of a character feature dictionary used for synthesizing a word feature; a synthesizing unit synthesizing a word feature for a comparison based on a word list to be recognized from column or row features within a feature dictionary a capacity of which is reduced by said capacity reducing unit; a feature extracting unit extracting a feature of an input word; and a comparing unit making a comparison between the feature of the input word, which is extracted by said feature extracting unit, and a synthesized word feature.