In this paper, we propose an HMM(Hidden Markov modeJ)-MLP(Multi-layer perceptron) hybrid model for recognizing legal words on the English bank check. We adopt an explicit segmentation-based word level architecture to implement an HMM engine with nonscaled and non-normalized symbol vectors. We also introduce an MLP for implicit segmentation-based word recognition. The final recognition model consists of a hybrid combination of the HMM and MLP with a new hybrid probability measure. The main contributions of this model are a novel design of the segmentation-based variable length HMMs and an efficient method of combining two heterogeneous recognition engines. ExperimenLs have been conducted using the legal word database of CENPARMI with encouraging results.