1. An on-line recognition method for a handwritten pattern comprising the steps of: sampling successively coordinate information of strokes of a handwritten pattern; segmentalizing the coordinate information of one stroke into line segments consisting of at least either of straight line segments and curved line seg- ments; quantizing the line segments so that the direction of each line segment is classified by one of predetermined angles; normalizing an input pattern constituted by the quantized line segments to determine presence and absence of connections between the line segments; rearranging the order of the quantized line segments in accordance with a predetermined connection sequence, on the basis of the determination result of the preceeding step; reading out a dictionary pattern already stored in a memory; and calculating degree of difference between the input pattern and the readout dictionary pattern by comparing the both on the basis of the quantized angles and the rearranged order of the quantized line segments, to thereby recognize the input pattern.