I dumped Apple’s word list

speckx 144 points 81 comments November 03, 2026
helgesver.re · View on Hacker News

Discussion Highlights (19 comments)

Retr0id

I'd appreciate if someone could dump the iOS "adult websites" list (which are blocked by default in the UK unless you submit government ID etc.)

swid

This is interesting… does anyone have data in theirs? It also feels like something they could have put on an intern and it didn’t really gain any traction. Each app would need to “tell” the OS who the receiver is, and the article indicates there is no API to do that. Maybe it just knows, but how could that be?

_false

if autocorrect is disabled this will be empty

verytrivial

I have a MacBook that was meant to replace my aging Windows and Linux laptops. This article is a microcosm of why I have just stopped using it. An endless stream of mollycoddling, obfuscation and "It's for your own good, child" trash. I can't even bring myself to sell it because I'm ashamed of it.

ajjenkins

Why would “trump” be considered an offensive term? My understanding of the database is to prevent you from accidentally typing offensive or words being autocorrected to something offensive. Like if I misspell “helper” I don’t want that to be autocorrected to “hitler”. It’s surprising to me that “trump” would get the same classification. Given that he’s the current president of the US, I’m sure people intentionally type his name all the time. I don’t want my keyboard to steer me away from writing out “trump”. And typos autocorrecting to Trump don’t seem like a big deal either. Would anyone be offended by the text “don’t forget to bring your Trump to band practice”?

anonymous908213

Somebody please kill Claude I'm so fucking tired of reading this grating writing. Technology was a mistake

CalChris

Right on Trump and wrong on Putin.

ixtli

Incredible that 'conservatards' is in there but not 'libtard'. I thought the right was always being censored!

nonethewiser

Apple's built-in dictionary flags on my Mac: 26.2, which is newer than the article's 15.6. Apple has changed several things since: ┌───────────────┬────────────────┬──────────────────────────────────────────┐ │ │ Article (15.6) │ My Mac (26.2) │ ├───────────────┼────────────────┼──────────────────────────────────────────┤ │ Total entries │ 199,019 │ 199,940 │ ├───────────────┼────────────────┼──────────────────────────────────────────┤ │ Vulgar │ 1,050 │ 850 │ ├───────────────┼────────────────┼──────────────────────────────────────────┤ │ Offensive │ 663 │ 727 │ ├───────────────┼────────────────┼──────────────────────────────────────────┤ │ Sensitive │ 2,558 │ 2,748 │ ├───────────────┼────────────────┼──────────────────────────────────────────┤ │ Oedipus │ vulgar │ sensitive (sex topic) │ ├───────────────┼────────────────┼──────────────────────────────────────────┤ │ cooties │ vulgar │ clean │ ├───────────────┼────────────────┼──────────────────────────────────────────┤ │ Biden │ clean │ now tagged politics topic, still no tier │ └───────────────┴────────────────┴──────────────────────────────────────────┘ These are unchanged: - Trump is still sensitive with the politics topic. The lowercase card-game word "trump" is still clean. - Obama, Putin, Vance and Harris have no tier. Musk still isn't in the dictionary. - Tom and Mick are still offensive, and pee, poo, niggle, underling, blacklist and Isis are still sensitive. - idiot is still sensitive, and now also has the catch-all "sensitive context" topic. Words in the capitalized sensitive list that the article doesn't mention include Saddam, Grindr, Oedipus/Oedipal, TERF and Viagra. Trump is still the only living politician among them.

rdtsc

Putin clean Stalin clean Somehow Mao is there. But Pol Pot isn't. I would have guessed they'd go by the number of victims. But I guess "Uncle Joe" is clean and uncontroversial, so someone was confused about history. But yeah, this has that "Cupertino interns typed this list" feel to it.

baggachipz

> Every other real person on that list is dead, and nearly all of them are Nazi officials, dictators or terrorists. Then there's Trump If the shoe fits....

deprave

Why does Apple need to keep these in a separate database? I thought they removed filtering, maybe subject to user age or parental controls, not added a whole mechanism to manage it.

jmbwell

This is about autocorrect learning words you like to use that it should consider potentially intentional use of words it might otherwise think you typed accidentally It’s adaptive non-censorship

thinkingemote

Would it be possible to get versions of the files to see when certain words got added and I imagine certain words got removed? Could be interesting to correlate certain events, personalities, trends, memes, controversies etc with the changes. It was added in 23 so there's potentially 3 years of updates. Edits: This comment shows differences between 15.6 and 26.2 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50358223

whycome

Does this play a role in why the keyboard on iOS is so fucking enraging? It used to be amazing.

rappatic

> I dumped Apple's word list Claude dumped Apple's word list, and obviously wrote the article too.

nonethewiser

There is a lot more interesting stuff to mine from this. The phrase blocklist for the Chinese lanaguge is a lot larger (surprise, surprise). It about 281 KB for Simplified Chinese, 325 KB for Traditional and 160 KB for Cantonese, against 28 KB for English. apparently there are `shouldShowTaiwanFlagEmoji()` and `deviceIsChinese()` functions as well but that doesn't have anything to do with this database.

jooize

giving fixing ducking How do I make iOS let me swipe “fucking” everywhere? fucking fucking fucking fucking!! After typing it manually two or three times it then swipe completes in this particular text field in this app. I've heard about adding a contact with the words, but that is ridiculous, so I have held out hoping Apple will eventually come to their senses, like a fool. This doesn't make “fuck” swipeable either… unless I type it once, and keep it in the text field!

swiftcoder

The vulgar db doesn't exist at all (nor the ~/Library/Keyboards directory) on my Tahoe install. Weird

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