1. Apparatus for incremental recognition of ideographic handwriting comprising: a computer entry tablet for entering strokes of an ideographic character in natural stroke order; an incremental character recognizer coupled to said computer entry tablet, responsive to partial characters, that generates an hypothesis list of at least one candidate character containing said strokes; means for displaying said hypothesis list; means for selecting a correct character from among said at least one candidate character of said hypothesis list; means for providing at least one additional individual stroke in natural stroke order to said incremental character recognizer if none of said at least one candidate character of said hypothesis list have been selected.