Abstract: In this paper, we present an approach towards the retrieval of words from graphical document images. In graphical documents, due to presence of multi-oriented characters in non-structured layout, word indexing is a challenging task. The proposed approach uses recognition results of individual components to form character pairs with the neighboring components. An indexing scheme is designed to store the spatial description of components and to access them efficiently. Given a query text word (ascii/unicode format), the character pairs present in it are searched in the document. Next the retrieved character pairs are linked sequentially to form character string. Dynamic programming is applied to find different instances of query words. A string edit distance is used here to match the query word as the objective function. Recognition of multi-scale and multi-oriented character component is done using Support Vector Machine classifier. To consider multi-oriented character strings the features used in the SVM are invariant to character orientation. Experimental results show that the method is efficient to locate a query word from multi-oriented text in graphical documents.