Apple's iPhone Keyboard Hides Tens of Thousands of Words

What is on the list

Researcher Derik Kauffman, who documented the finding, says most entries are expected: words tied to violence, drugs and overtly sexual themes. Others are more surprising. Phrases such as "dictator Trump" and "sleepy Joe", both common in public political commentary, are on the list.

The filtering is not limited to US topics. The keyboard also avoids terms like "Tibetan independence" and "United Ireland", as well as phrases mocking politicians including Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and opposition leader Rahul Gandhi. Kauffman says every major language the iOS keyboard supports has its own version of the list.

How it was found

Kauffman became suspicious when swipe-typing phrases such as "bad boy" and "white man" produced odd results. He then used OpenAI's Codex and Anthropic's Claude Code to dig into iOS and eventually found thousands of entries.

Reuters ran its own tests. Swipe-typing "Tibetan independence" and "United Ireland" often turned them into "Tibetan independences" and "United Iceland", and "white man" became "white mean", while "red man" and "blue man" went through without trouble.

Apple gave no detailed explanation. It said only that the built-in keyboard is designed to avoid suggesting words that could be offensive or inappropriate.

David Greene, a lawyer at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, told Reuters that part of him found the list "creepy", though he understood the case for limiting inflammatory suggestions. The findings add to scattered user reports over the years of the keyboard refusing to cooperate with certain words.