How to stop iPhone from auto-correcting swear words

Here is how to stop your iPhone from autocorrecting swear words. It’s not a simple toggle switch in Settings, unfortunately — but it’ll only take you a few minutes to fix it once and for all.

Apple presents an annoyingly family-friendly image. It doesn’t want the iPhone to autocorrect a swear word to protect the innocence of children. It doesn’t want porn on the App Store (even if it’s a tap away in Safari).

Luckily, for the adults in the room, it’s all surface-level means of protection. Here’s how you can get your iPhone to let you swear again.

How to stop iPhone from autocorrecting swear words

You can also watch a video with these instructions here:

To stop the madness, first go to Settings > General > Keyboard > Text Replacement.

Tap the + in the upper-right corner. It’s here that you are going to enter the swear words you don’t want autocorrected.

For both Phrase and Shortcut, you’re going to type the same thing: your favorite swear word that Apple’s Auto-Correction feature won’t let you type (or your editors won’t let you write in a blog).

This ensures that if you correctly type (or almost type) a swear word, your prudish iPhone won’t switch it out for something else.

Add some more useful shortcuts while you’re at it

Here’s another pro tip while you’re in the Text Replacement screen: a faster way to enter in your email address(es). The iPhone keyboard doesn’t always autocomplete your email address when you need it to.

Tap the + again and enter your email address as the phrase, and for the shortcut, enter in @@. Keep doing this if you have multiple emails: your work email (@@w), your personal Gmail (@@g), your iCloud email (@@i) and any others.

I’ve created a few for special text characters:

• xx → × for the multiplication sign, useful when writing about display resolutions (5120 × 2880).
• tm → ™ for the trademark symbol.
• aaaa →  for the Apple symbol. Of course, on the Mac, you can always use the keyboard shortcut Shift+Option+K (⇧⌥K).

I have a number of other replacements that I use every day:

• scom → site:cultofmac.com, so that I can quickly Google Cult of Mac articles.
• sapl → site:support.apple.com for finding Apple Support pages (like this weird one).
• dgjcom → D. Griffin Jones/Cult of Mac for crediting my screenshots.

These snippets can be used for anything you type over and over, such as your address, telephone number, etc. — even canned replies to emails you send over and over again. If you know someone with a name that’s often snagged by autocorrect, like Pavel, you can add their name as a text replacement, too. There are lots and lots of possibilities.