15. A method as set forth in claim 11 wherein the step of operating the decoder processor to process the frames includes a step of establishing a two dimensional array having N columns and L rows, wherein N=a number of frames, and wherein L=a number of letters in a word found within the vocabulary model.
11. A method for operating a handwriting recognition apparatus, comprising the steps of: outputting temporally ordered stroke coordinate information generated by a writer while writing, in a cursive manner, a word that includes at least one character; operating a handwriting recognition pre-processor in response to outputted stroke coordinate information by the steps of, operating a splicer to perform a step of partitioning the outputted temporally ordered stroke coordinate information into a plurality of frames, each frame containing at least a portion of a stroke; and operating a frame shape recognizer to perform a step of 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 ; the method further comprising a step of operating a word recognizer for outputting a most probable word that was written by the writer by the steps of, performing an initial step of storing a vocabulary model as a data structure within a memory of the handwriting recognition apparatus, the data structure being organized to have 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 operating a decoder processor to process, in turn, each of the frames in cooperation with information retrieved from the vocabulary model to determine a most probable letter-frame alignment for identifying a most probable word written by the writer for output from the word recognizer.