The recognition of legal amount present on a bank cheque is a big challenge because of the structural complexity of characters and variability of writing styles in automatic bank cheque processing. This paper proposes a technique of text word recognition based on template matching technique using Correlation coefficient. We have developed a database of 61 words, combination of which can represent any legal amount written in words in Indian bank cheque. Proposed algorithm is tested on our database and overall 76.4 percent word recognition accuracy is achieved which is an encouraging result for off-line word recognition. © 2015 IEEE.