We propose a method for recognizing human actions in videos. Inspired from the recent bag-of-words approaches, we represent actions as documents consisting of words, where a word refers to the pose in a frame. Histogram of oriented gradients (HOG) features are used to describe poses, which are then vector quantized to obtain pose-words. As an alternative to bagof- words approaches, that only represent actions as a collection of words by discarding the temporal characteristics of actions, we represent videos as ordered sequence of pose-words, that is as pose sentences. Then, string matching techniques are exploited to find the similarity of two action sequences. In the experiments, performed on data set of Blank et al., 92% performance is obtained. © 2008 IEEE.