iOS Apparently Maintains a List of 4,500+ Phrases It Won’t Autocomplete

Everyone knows how ducking frustrating it can be trying to swear in an iPhone message, but did you know that Apple’s prudishness goes well beyond just trying to steer you away from using naughty words? Beyond the words it actively autocorrects to something else, new research suggests that iOS maintains what researcher Derik Kauffman calls a “gray list”—phrases that it will never suggest, no matter how often you type them, and will often refuse to recognize when you use swipe typing. According to an interview with Reuters, Kauffman started looking into the possibility that his phone was steering him away from using words and phrases after “noticing that his swipe typing—the practice of gliding a finger back and forth over a keyboard rather than pecking out each word individually—would stutter over certain phrases.” Using “a combination of OpenAI’s Codex and Anthropic’s Claude Code”—sigh—Kauffman discovered the list, which he’s published on a site called Swipeblocked. The site explains that if a word or phrase is on the list, “Predictive text never offers a phrase on the list, even when it’s the obvious next word… [and] swipe typing … picks another word, sometimes an implausible one, and can change a word you already entered.” Kauffman calls the list a “gray list” rather than a blacklist because iOS won’t autocorrect words typed out individually—so there’s no “ugh I hate that ducking aunt”—but it also won’t help you use them. Apple told Reuters that its keyboard is designed to avoid offering potentially inappropriate or offensive suggestions, but declined to explain why particular phrases were on the list. The company emphasized that users can still type whatever they want and override predictive text suggestions. Many of the words are what you might expect: iOS won’t autocomplete slurs or insults like “son of a bitch”, and it will never recommend that you follow the word “crystal” with “meth” or “smoking” with “weed.” In quintessential Silicon Valley style, Apple avoids anything remotely political, so phrases like “Tibetan independence,” “Kashmir dispute” and “united Ireland” are all on the list. (As an Australian, I am amused to note that my country’s name appears on the list twice, in the phrases “Australia is a very bad” and “Australia is a very poor.”) While some entries are amusing—Apple is apparently all in on the name “macOS”, because “OS x” is on the list, as is “iMessage isn’t working”—others are more egregious. According to the site, there is precisely one person’s full name on the list, and that name is… “Trayvon Martin,” the teenager whose murder helped spark the Black Lives Matter movement. There are also some inexplicable dichotomies: “bad girl” is out but “bad boy” is OK; “black man” is fine but “white man” is not; and while “read smut” is acceptable, “read gay smut” is apparently too risque for Apple’s tastes. Curiously, some phrases also don’t autocomplete but do appear when entered via swiping. These include “make America great again” and “Covid was a hoax,” both phrases that your correspondent would happily fire directly into the sun. It’s also interesting to note that the list includes some language-specific proscriptions—these include “العدوان الإسرائيلي” (“Israeli aggression”), “השטחים הכבושים” (“the occupied territories”) and “台独” (“Taiwan independence”). Anyway, if you’re wondering why your iPhone refuses to autocomplete “anal clown” or “buy some MDMA,” or find yourself wondering whether your own pet phrase is on the list, you can see the entire 4,513-item English-language catalog here, with requisite warnings about it containing all manner of nastiness.