Two problems of a keyword spotting system that are not encountered in isolated work recognition systems are the detection of the beginning and ending of the words within the context of other words and the phenomena that occur at the word junctures. A modification of the Harpy connected speech recognition system has yielded a word and phrase spotting system that deals with these problems. This word spotting system incorporates the lexical and word juncture knowledge and uses a modified beam search technique of the Harpy system. This enables the system to not only rapidly and accurately spot single words within any context but also multiple words and/or complex phrases. Performance results of the system will be presented for various words and phrases and for different threshold values.