The invention deals with speech recognition, such as a system for recognizing words in continuous speech. A speech recognition system is disclosed which is capable of recognizing a huge number of words, and in principle even an unlimited number of words. The speech recognition system comprises a word recognizer for deriving a best path through a word graph, and wherein words are assigned to the speech based on the best path. The word score being obtained from applying a phonemic language model to each word of the word graph. Moreover, the invention deals with an apparatus and a method for identifying words from a sound block and to computer readable code for implementing the method.