How to Get Your Phone to Stop Autocorrecting ‘F–k’

We’ve all been there — you’re in the middle of a heated conversation and trying to spell out a certain bad word when your phone changes it to “ducking,” a word that’s used a lot less often than the one we intend to spell . Here’s how to get your phone to stop auto-correcting the word “fuck.”

There is more than one method to ward off the “duck” once and for all. The first is to simply go through your phone’s settings and manually change the keyword so it doesn’t get automatically corrected – this method has pretty much always existed, but based on a specific tweet we saw recently, we know that there are people who do this are not aware of it. The tweet in question is also how we discovered the second strategy.

You might be wondering why the heck are we writing an article about this. To be honest, the rock and metal community swears a lot, so we know that the majority of you have probably encountered this problem at some point. While a 2015 MusixMatch study found that hip-hop contains more profanity than any other genre, metal came in a close second. A word cloud created by a fan in 2019 showed that “fuck,” “shit,” and “hell” were among the most used words in Slipknot’s lyrics, so we’ve got our eyes on you specifically, Maggots.

Read on to learn more about the different autocorrect combat strategies. We should note that these methods are for iPhone.

Method 1 – Turn off autocorrect

That’s pretty easy. Go into your phone’s settings, then tap on “General” and then on “Keyboard”. If the button next to AutoCorrect is green, it’s enabled. Tap on it to turn it off and you can type “fuck” as much as you want. It’s important to note, however, that this turns off the feature entirely, leaving you free to fix all other misspellings yourself with each type.

Method 2 – Customize it in Text Replacement

Method #2 has been around as long as autocorrect. You go into your settings again and then tap on “General” and then on “Keyboard”. One of the options above is called “Text Replacement,” so tap it and you’ll be taken to another page. Here you can edit and add various phrases you want autocorrect to implement – for example, “omw” is a standard Apple acronym for “On my way!”. Whenever you type those three letters, your phone will change them into the phrase unless you press the small “x” when the suggestion appears.

To change “duck” to “fuck,” add the word “duck” to “phrase” and then “fuck” to the abbreviation. This also works for the “ing” counterparts of both words, but with this strategy, it can be frustrating when you’re actually trying to talk about a duck.

Method 3 – Add the word as a contact

Unfortunately – we have arrived at the latest technology. Here you would just add the word “fuck” as a contact in your phone and then it will stop trying to auto-correct the word to duck. It probably works for all other swear words too, so go ahead and fill your contacts with countless entries to your heart’s content. We tried it and it works.

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