A novel approach towards word segmentation and baseline detection in a handwritten document is proposed. It is based on certain structural properties of isothetic covers tightly enclosing the words in a handwritten document. For an appropriate grid size, the isothetic covers successfully segregates the words so that each cover corresponds to a particular word. By analyzing the horizontal chords of these covers, the corresponding baselines are extracted. The method is fast, robust, and efficient by dint of its traversal strategy along the word boundaries in a combinatorial manner and usage of limited operations strictly in the integer domain. Some results on several Bengali and English handwritings have been given to demonstrate its strength and elegance.