A memristor-based pattern-matching circuit for realising a hardware oriented approach to isolated speech word recognition is introduced. As distinct from algorithmic solutions, the approach takes advantage of the memristor to memorise and match speech templates in a fast, parallel, low-power and scalable architecture. When tested for isolated word recognition by simulations on the benchmark (TIMIT) and Massachusetts Institute of Technology database, recognition accuracies of 94.5% on clean words and 88% on words with a SNR of 5 dB were achieved.