PURPOSE: To provide an English character recognizing device which can eliminate the integrating errors of broken characters and can recognize the English characters with high accuracy.

CONSTITUTION: An English character recognizing device is provided with a character rectangle detecting means 3 which decides a rectangle that is virtually circumscribed to characters as a character rectangle based on the continuation of black picture elements in a document image, a broken character integrating means 11 which performs the integration processing by deciding one character when a certain space between character rectangles is smaller than other spaces of character rectangular, and a character recognizing means 9 which recognizes the characters in the character rectangles and the characters in the character rectangles that have been integrally processed through the means 11. Furthermore, a recognition result deciding means 15 is added to confirm and decide the results of characters in the character rectangle recognized by the means 9. Then, only the character rectangles that are not decided by the means 15 are integrated by the means 11. The character images of the character rectangles to which the recognition results are decided are excluded in regard of decision of the broken characters. Thus, it is possible to prevent such a case where the characters other than the broken characters are wrong integrated even with a document of small character pitches.