In this paper, we present a novel problem of handwritten word spotting in cluttered environment where a word is cluttered by a strike-through with a line stroke. These line strokes can be straight, slant, broken, continuous, or wavy in nature. Vertical Projection Profile (VPP) feature and its modified version, which is the combinatorics Vertical Projection Profile (cVPP) feature is extracted and aligned by modified Dynamic Time Warping (DTW) algorithm. The dataset for the proposed problem is not available so we prepared our dataset. We compare our method with Rath and Manmath [6], and PHOCNET [17] for handwritten word spotting in the presence of strike-through, and achieve better results. © 2020, Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd.