iPhone keyboard omits about 100,000 words and phrases from suggestions — Reuters

According to Kaufman's estimates, the list contains about 100,000 items, not counting Chinese characters. Most are profanities, insults, and words related to drugs, sex, and violence, but political expressions are also found: "Dictator Trump", "Sleepy Joe", "Tibetan independence", and "United Ireland". They can be typed manually, but they do not appear in autocomplete, and when swiping, the system sometimes replaces them with similar words, for example "Sleepy Joe" with "Sleepy hope".

According to Reuters, similar lists exist for 27 other languages and writing systems. In Chinese, in particular, a nickname for Xi Jinping and the name of the 1989 Tiananmen Square events are blocked. The researcher only partially deciphered the Russian list. According to his calculations, the English list expanded to approximately 4,500 phrases in iOS 27, compared to about 1,700 in iOS 14.

Kaufman noticed swipe-typing glitches in September and then found the directory in iOS internal files using OpenAI Codex and Claude Code. The phrases themselves are not stored in the system—only their hashes. Engineer Matt Suiche independently obtained almost the same list, and Reuters journalists verified some of the expressions on an iPhone. The researcher himself called this "a very soft form of censorship."

Apple declined to discuss specific items and the size of the list, explaining that the keyboard should not offer potentially inappropriate or offensive suggestions, while users are free to type any text and reject a suggestion.