Swipeblocked catalogs the phrases Apple’s keyboard won’t suggest

Your iPhone’s reluctance to suggest certain words runs the gamut from bodily functions all the way to Santa Claus, revealing some interesting boundaries in Apple’s keyboard dictionary.

It just won’t put those words in your mouth. Or hands, I suppose.

“The iPhone keyboard carries a hidden list of thousands of phrases it will never suggest or let you swipe,” the website reads. “Alongside slurs, sex and drugs, the list covers political slogans, historical events and public figures.”

To be clear: this isn’t a new feature. For a long time, Apple has prioritized certain autocorrects and swiped words over others.

There is a reason for this. For example: a few slurs are one letter off from words you’re more likely to use.

If Apple were to suggest those words instead of the more plausible word, it would land itself in hot water. Not to mention, no one wants to have to explain “I didn’t mean to send that.”

Unsurprisingly, autocorrect, predictive text, and swipe won’t suggest offensive words. And how does it suss out what is and isn’t offensive?

A massive internal dictionary, of course.

Apple’s internal dictionary actually has three categories for words it won’t suggest: vulgar, offensive, and sensitive. The full list of the offending words, along with what category they fall under, is here.

Of course, it’s a good time to remind you that these words are, in fact, offensive. So if you click the link, you at least should know what you’re in for.

Apple isn’t stopping you from typing the whole word out yourself

As Swipeblocked points out: nothing stops you from typing any of these words. Apple just won’t go out of its way to suggest them.

There are, however, other words and phrases that Apple’s keyboard doesn’t suggest, even if they don’t fall in the aforementioned list. “Left wing conspiracy” is the one Swipeblocked mentions, saying that it changes it to “left wrong conspiracy.”

Of course, halfway down the page it also points out that you can’t swipe or predict “right wing conspiracy” or left and right wing propaganda.

Amusingly enough, you can’t say “Santa isn’t real” via swipe or predictive text, either.

“Apple doesn’t publish the list or say how it’s chosen. This site decodes it from the keyboard’s own data files, as of iOS 27,” Swipeblocked notes.

If you’d like to see the entire list of English blocked words and phrases, you can check them out here. Many of them are complete gibberish, such as “am some number ones most corrupt,” so I’m not entirely sure what this list proves in the long run.

And, as Swipeblocked mentions, English isn’t the only language that has suggestion blocks, either. It’s every language, and for cultural reasons, some languages have different blocks than others. Don’t salute the World War II German dictator, for instance.

At any rate, we here at AppleInsider are treating this as a curiosity. It’s interesting to pull back the curtain from time to time to see how the technology works, but it shouldn’t be seen as Apple’s attempt to control how its users speak to each other.