1. Handwriting recognition apparatus, comprising: handwriting transducer means having an output providing temporally-ordered stroke coordinate information generated by a writer while writing, in a cursive manner, a word that includes at least one letter; a pre-processor, comprising, a splicer having an input coupled to said output of said handwriting transducer means for partitioning the temporally ordered stroke coordinate information into a plurality of frames, each frame containing at least a portion of a stroke; and a frame shape recognizer coupled to an output of said Splicer for assigning to each frame a probability that the portion of a stroke that is contained within a frame f.sub.j is a part of a letter belonging to an alphabet a.sub.i ; said handwriting apparatus further comprising a word recognizer having an input coupled to an output of said pre-processor and an output for outputting a most probable word that was written by the writer, said word recognizer comprising, a vocabulary model stored within said handwriting recognition apparatus and containing a plurality of words, each of the words including at least one character, said vocabulary model being organized as a data structure having a root node, a plurality of intermediate nodes each representing a letter of the alphabet a.sub.i belonging to at least one word, and a plurality of leaf nodes each representing a terminal letter of a word; and a decoder processor having a first input coupled to an output of said pre-processor and a second input coupled to an output of said vocabulary model, said decoder processor including means for processing, in turn, each of said frames in cooperation with said vocabulary model to determine a most probable letter-frame alignment and for identifying a most probable word written by the writer to be output from said word recognizer.