A format-driven word recognition system is proposed for recognition of handwritten words. Unlike most traditional handwritten word recognizers being given a set of target words as lexicon, we assume that our system is given a set of format descriptions other than lexicon words. Applications of the proposed system include recognition of relatively more important keywords such as postal codes, titles or trademarks. The format descriptions are in terms of the lengths of the keywords, the types of the characters in the keywords and positional informations. Due to the important role of the keywords in the applications, the recognition expectations in terms of recognition rate and accuracy are usually higher then lexicon-driven word recognizers.