What Your iPhone Doesn't Want You to TypeOur analysis found over 14,000 words that are recognized as words when spelled accurately, but that won't be corrected even when they are only slightly misspelled. However, the vast majority of these words are technical or very rarely used words: "nephrotoxin," "sempstress," "sheepshank," or "Aesopian," to name a few.But among this list as well are more frequently used (and sensitive) words such as "abortion," "abort," "rape," "bullet," "ammo," "drunken," "drunkard," "abduct," "arouse," "Aryan," "murder," and "virginity." [...] In total, our analysis found dozens of words that were not identified as jargon or technical words but nonetheless did not offer corrections -- charged words like "bigot," "cuckold," "deflower," "homoerotic," "marijuana," "pornography," "prostitute," and "suicide." [...]
To find the list of excluded words, we came up with two different misspellings for roughly 250,000 words -- including all of the ones in the internal dictionary that ships with its desktop operating system -- and wrote an iOS program that would input each misspelled variant into an iOS simulator (a computer program that mimics the behavior of a factory-condition iPhone). We then made a separate program that simulated a user selecting from the menu of suggested corrections and recorded the results. After narrowing down the list to roughly 20,000 words that looked problematic, we tested 12 more different misspelling combinations. Words that did not offer an accurate correction any of the 14 times were added to our list of banned words. [...]
An Apple spokesperson declined to comment for this article.
Apple also declined to comment on changes made to Siri regarding abortion and birth control.
Asked by The Daily Beast why Apple software won't correct "abortiom" to "abortion," Siri responded only: "I'm sorry, I don't understand."