A spoken word recognition system for unspecified male speakers is outlined. The system operates in the following four stages. (I) Seven acoustic parameters are extracted every 10 ms from the outputs of the filter bank. The parameters are the frequencies of three spectral local peaks, the speech power and three parameters expressing the gross pattern of the spectrum. (II) Segmentation and the phoneme recognition are carried out. (III) Errors in the segmentation and phoneme recognition are corrected by means of phoneme connecting rules. (IV) The recognized sequence is determined to be the item of the dictionary having a maximum similarity to the recognized phonemic sequence. The similarity between the item of the dictionary and the recognized phonemic sequence is computed using confusion matrices made from the recognition of 17 040 phonemes. Every item of the dictionary is written in phonemic symbols derived from the word in Japanese “kana” letters by simple rules, so that the contents of the dictionary can be easily changed. The scores for word recognition were found to be 84.0% for 166 words uttered by 25 male speakers and 95.0% for 51 words selected from these 166.