This paper presents a multiple classifier system applied to the handwritten word recognition (HWR) problem. The goal is to analyse the influence of different global classifiers taken isolatedly as well as combined in a particular HWR task. The application proposed is the recognition of the Portuguese handwritten names of the months. The strategy takes advantage of the complementary mechanisms of three different classifiers: Conventional Neural Network, Class-Modular Neural Network and Hidden Markov Models, yielding a multiple classifier that is more efficient than either individual technique. The recognition rates obtained vary from 75.9% using the stand alone HMM classifier to 96.0% considering the classifiers combination.