Entering city names is an important issue for various speech driven applications such as telephone directory assistance. This paper proposes a system that combines word recognition with utterance verification and spelling as a fall back strategy. Word recognition experiments show that the use of a medium size vocabulary yields the lowest error rate when only permitting very few false ac-ceptances. For letter recognition discriminatively trained letter models are applied. In order to shorten the spelling procedure two abort conditions are introduced which re-duce the number of letters that have to be spelled. The system handles 96.5% of all calls correctly while less than 45% of all callers must spell the name.