A method and apparatus for generating a degraded dictionary automatically is presented in this invention. Herein, a degraded pattern generating means generates a plurality of degraded patterns from an original character image, based on a plurality of degradation parameters. A degraded dictionary generating means generates a plurality of degraded dictionaries corresponding to the plurality of degradation parameters, based on the plurality of degradation patterns. Finally, a dictionary matching means selects one of the plurality of dictionaries which matches the degradation level of a test sample set best, as the final degraded dictionary. In this invention, various degraded patterns can be generated by means of simple scaling and blurring process for establishing degraded dictionaries. Therefore, the invention can be implemented simply and easily. The method and apparatus of the invention can not only be used in character recognition field, but also can be used in other fields such as speech recognition and face recognition.