Apple Doesn’t Want You To Type ‘Abortion,’ ‘Rape’ Or ‘Virginity’ Into Your IPhone

It looks like Apple is intentionally playing dumb with its iOS 6 spell check feature.

A team over at The Daily Beast put together a rigorous program to find the words that Apple won’t offer corrections for, even when misspelled by just one letter.

Words such as “abortion,” “rape,” “virginity,” “Aryan,” and “bullets” all made the list. “Pornography,” “Marijuana,” and “suicide” failed to get corrections too.

The tests were conducted using an iPhone developer program capable of emulating an iPhone running the current iOS 6 operating system, which then cycled through multiple common misspellings of words. Since iPhones are capable of expanding their dictionary the more you type, factory settings were used. The results show that fresh-out-of-the-box iPhones purchased today won’t correct even the most commonly misspelled controversial words such as “abortion” and “pornography.”

 Oddly enough, iPhones running software earlier than iOS 6, such as iOS 3.1.3, do offer corrections such as “abortion,” “rape,” and “virginity” due to the fact that Apple used a different version of its spell check software back then, called autocorrect.

 While a vast majority of iPhone users will be using iOS 6, we thought we’d conduct a quick test on Apple’s newly announced iOS 7, which will be available sometime this fall. Using an iPhone running iOS 7 Beta, we intentionally misspelled words “suicide,” ”virginity,” and “Marijuana.”

 We found that “Marijuama” was easily corrected to the alternatively spelled “Marihuana” (perhaps due to increased legalization in states such as Colorado and Washington?), while misspellings of “virginity” and “suicide” were met with a simple “No Replacements Found.” Of course, Apple could still make significant changes to iOS 7 before it is released to the public.