Let a finite alphabet Ω. We consider a sequence of letters from Ωgenerated by a discrete time semi-Markov process $\{Z_{\gamma};\ \gamma\in \xN \}.$ Wederive the probability of a word occurrence in the sequence. We also obtain resultsfor the mean and variance of the number of overlapping occurrences of a word in afinite discrete time semi-Markov sequence of letters under certain conditions.