A novel method for recognizing character strings, based on a lexical search approach, is presented. In this method, a character string is recognized by searching for a sequence of segmented patterns that fits a string in a lexicon. A remarkable characteristic of this method is that character segmentation and character classification work as subfunctions of the search. The lexical search approach enables the parameters of character classifier to adapt to each segmented pattern. As a result, it improves the recognition accuracy by omitting useless candidates of character classification and by changing the criterion of rejection dynamically. Moreover, the processing time is drastically reduced by using minimum sets of categories for each segmented pattern. The validity of the developed method is shown by the experimental results using a lexicon including 44,700 character strings.