Various technologies and techniques are disclosed for providing bi-handwriting directional handwriting recognition and correction. A combined handwriting recognizer is provided that supports left-to-right and right-to-left language recognition by using a combined dictionary. The combined dictionary includes a dictionary from a language in a first direction, along with a backwards version of a dictionary from a language in a second direction. The combined recognizer is used with the combined dictionary to generate a most likely recognition result for mixed direction hand written input received from a user. Character by character correction is provided for mixed left-to-right and right-to-left text. The most likely recognition result is displayed in a visual order. The user can correct a particular character to a different character. When recognized text needs to be sent to a separate application, an inverse bi-directional process is performed to convert the text from the visual order to the logical order.