A method and apparatus for recognition of handwritten input is disclosed where handwritten input composed of a sequence of (x, y, pen) points, is preprocessed into a sequence of strokes. A short list of candidate characters that are likely matches for the handwritten input is determined by finding a fast matching distance between the input sequence of strokes and a sequence of strokes representing each candidate character of a large character set where the sequence of strokes for each candidate character is derived from statistical analysis of empirical data. A the final sorted list of candidate characters which are likely matches for the handwritten input is determined by finding a detailed matching distance between the input sequence of strokes and the sequence of strokes for each candidate character of the short list. A final selectable list of candidate characters is presented to a user.