Paper presents an algorithm for acceleration of the dynamic time warping (DTW) based isolated word recognition algorithm. The number of matching operations directly depends on the size of vocabulary. A set of perceptual cepstrum features is calculated for each word and stored in the vocabulary as a reference. Additionally all words (references) are compared between each other using DTW in order to get the reference-to-reference matches. The acceleration of pattern matching is acquired by adaptive search of the pattern reference according to the previous matching results and reference-to-reference matches. A modified word selection scenario applied for the vocabulary reduces the number of matching operations by 62-70 % in average. The reduction of matching operations allows to use DTW based speech recognition methods in real-time control applications and only need additional 13 % of vocabulary storage space.