embodiment the word pattern recognition system 10 can be saved on a suitable storage medium such as a diskette a cd a hard drive or like devices a high level hierarchy of one embodiment of the word pattern recognition system and method is illustrated in fig2 the system and method comprises a continuous stroke recognizer 205 to capture a continuous stroke of a user on a virtual keyboard interface 200 an example of continuous stroke input on a virtual atomik keyboard interface 600 is shown in fig6 which also illustrates a continuous stroke 605 in the embodiment illustrated in fig2 the continuous stroke recognizer 205 sends a preview set of words to a preview unit 210 the preview unit 210 then displays the preview set of words in correction display 215 the preview set of words can be empty in which case no word is displayed in the correction display 215 the preview set of words can consist of only one word in which case only one preview word is displayed in the correction display and so on the order of the steps in the embodiments illustrated in the various drawing figures including fig2 3 4 and 5 may be varied depending upon the application and desired result or output in an alternative embodiment a user is provided with the option of directly selecting a preview word by extending the continuous stroke to intersect the representation of the.