Your iPhone’s reluctance to suggest certain words ranges from bodily functions to Santa Claus, revealing some interesting boundaries in Apple’s keyboard dictionary.
A new website, Swipeblocked, wants you to know that there are thousands of words and phrases that your iPhone won’t let you say. Except it will let you say them all.
He just won’t put those words in your mouth. Or hands, I suppose.
“The iPhone keyboard contains a hidden list of thousands of phrases that will never suggest or allow you to scroll,” the site reads. “In addition to insults, sex and drugs, the list includes political slogans, historical events and public figures.”
To be clear: this is not a new feature. For a long time, Apple has prioritized some autocorrects and word scrolling over others.
There’s a reason for this. For example: Some ligatures are one letter away from the words you are likely to use.
If Apple were to suggest those words instead of the most plausible word, it would get in trouble. Not to mention, no one wants to have to explain “I didn’t mean to send it.”
Not surprisingly, autocorrect, predictive text, and scrolling do not suggest offensive words. And how do you understand what is offensive and what is not?
A huge internal dictionary, of course.
Apple’s internal dictionary actually has three categories for words it doesn’t suggest: vulgar, offensive, and sensitive. The full list of offensive words, along with the category they fall into, is here.
Of course, this is a good time to remind you that these words are, in fact, offensive. So if you click on the link, you should at least know what you’re in for.
Apple doesn’t prevent you from typing the entire word yourself
As Swipeblocked points out: There’s nothing stopping you from typing one of these words. Apple simply won’t go out of its way to suggest them.
However, there are other words and phrases that the Apple keyboard does not suggest, even if they are not included in the above list. “Left-wing conspiracy” is the one Swipeblocked mentions, saying he changes it to “wrong left-wing conspiracy.”
Of course, halfway down the page it also points out that it is not possible to scroll through or predict “right-wing conspiracy” or left-right propaganda.
Amusingly enough, you can’t even tell “Santa isn’t real” via scrolling or predictive text.
“Apple doesn’t publish the list or say how it’s chosen. This site decodes it from keyboard data files, starting with iOS 27,” Swipeblocked notes.
If you want to see the entire list of blocked English words and phrases, you can check them here. Many of them are complete nonsense, like “they are some of the most corrupt number ones”, so I’m not entirely sure what this list proves in the long term.
And, as Swipeblocked mentioned, English isn’t even the only language to have suggestion blocks. It’s every language, and for cultural reasons, some languages have different blocks than others. Don’t pay homage to the German dictator of World War II, for example.
In any case, we are here at AppleInsider they treat it as a curiosity. It’s interesting to pull back the curtain every now and then to see how the technology works, but it shouldn’t be seen as Apple’s attempt to control how its users talk to each other.
