A log-index weighted cepstral distance measure is proposed and tested in speaker-independent and speaker-dependent isolated word recognition systems using statistic techniques. The weights for the cepstral coefficients of this measure equal the logarithm of the corresponding indices. The experimental results show that this kind of measure works better than any other weighted Euclidean cepstral distance measures on three speech databases. The error rate obtained using this measure is about 1.8 percent for three databases on average, which is a 25% reduction from that obtained using other measures, and a 40% reduction from that obtained using Log Likelihood Ratio (LLR) measure. The experimental results also show that this kind of distance measure works well in both speaker-dependent and speaker-independent speech recognition systems. A log-index weighted cepstral distance measure is proposed and tested in speaker-independent and speaker-dependent isolated word recognition systems using statistic techniques. The weights for the cepstral coefficients of this measure equal the logarithm of the corresponding indices. The experimental results show that this kind of measure works better than any other weighted Euclidean cepstral distance measures on three speech databases. The error rate obtained using this measure is about 1.8 percent for three databases on average, which is a 25% reduction from that obtained using other measures, and a 40% reduction from that obtained using Log Likelihood Ratio (LLR) measure. The experimental results also show that this kind of distance measure works well in both speaker-dependent and speaker-independent speech recognition systems.