1. A word recognition apparatus comprising: a memory; and a control unit comprising one or more processors configured to: receive input of a word image representing a plurality of characters; recognize the word image and select a first word candidate and a second word candidate based on a plurality of words in a word dictionary; identify unmatched characters between the first word candidate and the second word candidate; compare a first image with a second image, the first image corresponding to a portion of the word image and the second image corresponding to the unmatched characters; and determine a likelihood of the first word candidate based on the comparison between the first image and the second image.