In this article, an online handwritten word recognition system for the Gujarati language is presented by combining strokes, characters, punctuation marks, and diacritics. The authors have used a support vector machine classification algorithm with a radial basis function kernel. The authors used a hybrid features set. The hybrid feature set consists of directional features with curvature data. The authors have used a normalized chain code and zoning-based chain code features. Words are a combination of characters and diacritics. Recognized strokes require post-processing to form a word. The authors have used location-based and mapping rule-based post-processing methods. The authors have achieved an accuracy of 95.3% for individual characters, 91.5% for individual words, and 83.3% for sentences. The average processing time for individual characters is 0.071 seconds.