1. A method of electronically processing an utterance to locate candidate words at arbitrary positions within the utterance, including: dividing a dictionary of word representations into multiple word sets; for a particular word set; searching the utterance for likely instances of each word representation at locations in the utterance that overlap in time and scoring each likely word instance for a probability of a match between the word representation and a particular location in the utterance; wherein, the utterance is searched by multiple processors each operating on a respective one of the multiple word sets; and reporting at least a subset of likely word instances and respective probability scores for further electronic processing.