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iOS Autocorrect Work

Mistype a word - or even start typing a word properly - and autocorrect charges into the fray, offering a helpful suggestion to correct the misspelling or to save you the bother of completing the word letter by letter. And there's the first potential problem: if you've finished an unrecognised but correctly spelt word and you type a space or punctuation mark, or tap return, autocorrect will infer that you've accepted the substitution it recommended.

According to Apple's instructions, the way to dismiss an autocorrect bubble is to tap the tiny X inside the bubble itself. Fortunately, you don't have to be that precise: tap anywhere in the bubble to reject it. That is not much help on an iPad when the bubble happens to be far from the keyboard. Fortunately, you can overrule an autocorrect suggestion from the keyboard. tap the delete key, retype the last letter, and the suggestion disappears.

Mistaken

When you override an autocorrect suggestion, iOS learns your preferred word. earlier versions of the operating system learned more slowly, requiring you to issue vetoes on several occasions, but iOS 6 often learns from a single incident. the program then stores your words in the inaccessible, non-editable Keyboard dictionary. Once a word is in there, autocorrect won't attempt to correct it - and will even suggest it as a correction or completion. that sounds good, but it can be a problem.

Suppose you type tge and you're so used to dismissing autocorrect that you precipitately reject its suggestion of the. now every time you type tge, you must manually correct it. There is a workaround, though. You can trick iOS into thinking that tge is just a shortcut for the. Go to Settings → General → Keyboard; scroll down if necessary, and tap Add new Shortcut. type the in the Phrase field and tge in the Shortcut field, and tap Save. Henceforth, if you mistakenly type tge, iOS will correct the spelling to the.

If you have accumulated lots of mistaken entries in your dictionary, you can adopt the nuclear option and erase all the words your device has learned, en masse. Go to Settings → General → reset and tap reset Keyboard dictionary. doing so will cause autocorrect's learning process to restart from the very beginning.

Autocorrect

If you are a fast tap-typist ("tappist"?) and you don't want to use autocorrect at all, go to Settings → General → Keyboard and turn off the autocorrection feature.

Easy Ways to Add 'Correct' Words

Autocorrect won't suggest a replacement if it deems what you have typed to be a legitimate word. But how can you add technical terms, non-obvious place names, and other words not already in the Keyboard dictionary to its bank of legitimate words? You have two options.

One approach is to add a word to your Keyboard dictionary is by defining it as a semi-shortcut. Go to Settings → General → Keyboard → Add new Shortcut. In the Phrase field, type the word that you want to add, but don't type anything in the Shortcut field; then tap Save. From now on, autocorrect will not attempt to correct the spelling of that word when you type it.

The second method is even simpler; and if you ever reset your Keyboard dictionary, it has the added benefit of preserving all the words you've used it to designate. this approach takes advantage of the fact that autocorrect accepts Contacts name entries as genuine words and won't suggest that you change them.

Here's what you do: create a new contact, and type zzz as the initial letters in the Last field to keep it sorted at the bottom of the list, where it's out of the way. Then type each of your words, separated by spaces, into the First, Last, or Company field of the zzz contact.