Abstract The hand-written alphabet recognition and classification plays an important role in pattern recognition, computer vision as well as image processing. In last few decades, a plethora of applications based on this area are developed such as sign identification, multi lingual learning systems etc. This paper classifies samples of hand-written alphabets into different classes using various machine learning methods. The challenging factor in hand written alphabets recognition lie in variations of style, shape and size of the letters. In this paper a simplified and accurate methodology is proposed based upon engineered features which are evaluated and tested using MatLab tool in comparison to other existing methods. The proposed system achieves a substantial amount of accuracy of 98% as compared to the state of the art approaches.