1. An apparatus comprising: a) input means for inputting an utterance by an unspecified person into an electrical signal; b) characteristic extracting means for receiving the electrical signal from the input means and converting the electrical signal into a time series of discrete characteristic multidimensional vectors; c) phoneme recognition means for receiving the time series of discrete characteristic multidimensional vectors and converting each of said vectors into a time series of phoneme discriminating scores calculated thereby; d) a dictionary for pre-storing a reference pattern for each word to be recognized, each reference pattern comprising at least one phoneme label comprising a continuation time length for each phoneme stored in a data base of said dictionary, said continuation time length being uniformly set to a predetermined time length; e) word recognition means for comparing an input time series of phoneme discriminating scores derived from said phoneme recognition means with each reference pattern stored in said dictionary using a predetermined Dynamic Programming technique so that one of the reference patterns having a maximum matching score to the time series of discriminating scores is a result of word recognition; and f) output means for outputting the word based on the result of word recognition using said word recognition means in an encoded form thereof.