There is a growing need to access historical Ottoman documents stored in large archives and therefore managing tools for automatic searching, indexing and transcription of these documents is required. In this paper, we present a method for the retrieval of Ottoman documents based on word matching. The method first successfully segments the documents into word images and then uses a hierarchical matching technique to find the similar instances of the word images. The experiments show that even with simple features promising results can be achieved. Copyright 2006 ACM.