optical character recognitionn. Abbr. OCR1. The electronic identification and digital encoding of printed or handwritten characters by means of an optical scanner and specialized software.2. The technology involved in this process.American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fifth Edition. Copyright © 2016 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.op?tical char?acter recogni`tion n. the process or technology of reading printed or typed text by electronic means and converting it to digital data. Abbr.: OCR [1960?65] Random House Kernerman Webster’s College Dictionary, © 2010 K Dictionaries Ltd. Copyright 2005, 1997, 1991 by Random House, Inc. All rights reserved.