Typing on an iPhone. Photo: rawpixel / Unsplash (CC0
Your iPhone’s keyboard carries a hidden list of phrases it will never suggest, and a researcher has now decoded it. Predictive text refuses to offer anything on the list, even when it is the obvious next word, and swipe typing usually won’t produce those phrases either. Sometimes it even rewrites a word you already entered so the phrase never appears. The catalogue runs from slurs and sexual slang to political slogans, historical events and oddities such as “Santa isn’t real” and “iMessage isn’t working.”
Nothing on the list stops you from writing any of it. Tap the letters one by one and the keyboard lets everything through, so this is not a ban. It is a quieter kind of steering: Apple decides which words it will put under your thumb, and it does not publish the list or explain how a phrase ends up there. For anyone who relies on autocomplete or swipe instead of typing every letter, that choice shapes what is easy to say.
The researcher, Derik Kauffman, posted the decoded lists on a site called Swipeblocked, with his code and data on GitHub. The English list alone holds 4,513 phrases. Apple keeps similar lists for 27 other languages and scripts, and Reuters, which first reported the findings, counted more than 100,000 blocked words and phrases across all of them. Another researcher told Reuters they had pulled the same list independently.
The rules match exact word sequences, so a slightly different wording slips through. The swipe behaviour is stranger. After you swipe “left wing,” swiping “conspiracy” makes the keyboard go back and change “wing” to “wrong,” so “left wing conspiracy” never appears on screen. English has a separate, shorter list for swipe typing, about 2,800 phrases, which is why some entries, “Santa isn’t real” among them, can still be swiped but are never suggested. Single words Apple labels offensive are never suggested at all, and words it labels vulgar show up only after you have typed them yourself three times.
Some entries look like judgment calls that went only one way. “Bad girl” is blocked, “bad boy” is not. “I’m white” is blocked, “I’m black” is not. “Taiwan is country” is blocked, while “Taiwan is a country” passes. US political jibes such as “sleepy Joe” and “dictator Trump” sit alongside “NSA surveillance,” “Covid was a hoax,” “send nudes” and “tree hugger.” The only full name of a person on the English list is Trayvon Martin.
Other languages carry their own local flashpoints. The Chinese lists include “June Fourth,” the shorthand for the Tiananmen crackdown, and the name of Nobel Peace Prize laureate Liu Xiaobo. Chinese also works differently: the blocked words still appear when you type them in pinyin, but once you pick one, the keyboard stops suggesting what comes next. Kauffman found that one part of Apple’s Chinese typing engine skips suggestions whenever a word is “taiwan” or “tibet” written in English. Turkish blocks “Armenian genocide,” Italian blocks “Crimea is Russian,” and German blocks dozens of Nazi slogans. The entire Hebrew list has six entries.
The decoded lists leave a lot unanswered, starting with why any phrase is there. Apple stores the lists as 32-bit fingerprints rather than words, so Kauffman recovered them by generating candidate phrases and checking each one against Apple’s table. Anything nobody thought to test stays hidden, and he says the lists are incomplete wherever entries could not be decoded. He also warns that a phrase’s presence says nothing about Apple’s reason for adding it. Apple told Reuters its keyboard is designed to avoid potentially inappropriate or offensive suggestions, and that users can still type what they want or override a suggestion. That covers the slurs. It does not explain why “iMessage isn’t working” is on the list.
The filtering applies to every iPhone in every market, one list per keyboard language, and it has grown steadily. According to Kauffman’s version-by-version comparison, the English list held about 1,700 phrases in iOS 14 in 2020 and reached 4,513 in iOS 27.0. Apple updates it with each iOS release and, in between, through language data the iPhone downloads in the background. Entries also disappear: two presidential titles blocked since a 2022 update were removed in iOS 26.3.
Reuters reported the findings on November 6, saying Kauffman used OpenAI‘s Codex and Anthropic‘s Claude Code to locate the list deep inside iOS. His lists reflect iOS 27.0 and the language downloads Apple was serving in October 2026. Because those downloads can change the list without a software update, Swipeblocked now tracks each new version as it arrives. Apple has not said whether it will publish the list itself.
Until it does, the iPhone keyboard will keep making small decisions about your sentences that you can only see by noticing what it never offers.
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