This paper is aimed at exploring the potential of using discriminatory primitives containing words for the task of detecting skilled forgeries. We consider handwritten Devanagri documents for this work. We have obtained experimental handwriting data from subjects who have contributed handwriting samples in their natural handwriting. Other authors are asked to imitate the writing style of the subjects to produce a skilled forgery sample. Most of the literature dealing with writer recognition focus on signatures and very few reports have addressed the problem of detecting forgeries for handwritten Indian scripts. We also use multiple words based classification for the targeted task of forgery detection. Our experiments show encouraging results. © 2013 IEEE.