In this study, an ensemble classification method, based on negative correlation learning, is used for holistic recognition of handwritten words with limited vocabulary. In this method, training data set, after preprocessing and feature extraction, is applied to the base Multilayer Perceptron classifiers. These classifiers are trained by negative correlation learning to make them diverse. Features extracted from a test input are applied to the base classifiers, which produce somehow diverse outputs. By combining these outputs, the final output of the system is obtained. For experiments, three feature sets based on zoning, gradient image and contour chain code are extracted from the images. In experiments, performed on 775 images of 31 Province centers from "Iranshahr" dataset, when gradient-based features were used to train 6 Multilayer Perceptron classifiers by negative correlation, by Fusion the outputs of these classifiers through voting, an average recognition rate of 96.10 percent is achieved.