1. A method of electronically processing an utterance to locate candidate words at arbitrary positions within the utterance, including: accessing a dictionary of word sets each comprising multiple word representations; for each word representation, searching the utterance for likely instances of the word representation and scoring each likely word instance for a probability of a match to the word representation; wherein, the utterance is searched by multiple processors operating on the multiple word sets; and reporting at least a subset of likely word instances and respective probability scores for further electronic processing.