The present invention is directed to an address recognition apparatus for recognizing a written address. The apparatus includes an input device that receives a scanned image of the written address and transforms the image into digital data, a character recognizing section that recognizes a word string in the digital data on a unit character basis, a word extracting section that extracts characters recognized by the character recognizing section on a unit word basis, and an address word string dictionary that previously stores a plurality of first word strings. The apparatus further includes and an address word string recognizing section that collates a second word string, determines words of the second word string respectively corresponding to the words of the first word string, evaluates each of the first word strings, and recognizes one of the first word strings as the address word string.