Systems, apparatuses, and methods to relate images of words to a list of words are provided. A trellis based word decoder analyses a set of OCR characters and probabilities using a forward pass across a forward trellis and a reverse pass across a reverse trellis. Multiple paths may result, however, the most likely path from the trellises has the highest probability with valid links. A valid link is determined from the trellis by some dictionary word traversing the link. The most likely path is compared with a list of words to find the word closest to the most.