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Apple blocked swipe-typing for 100,000 words and phrases. Among them are ‘Dictator Trump’ and, in Russian, phrases about Putin and deploying troops.

Source: Reuters

Apple’s iOS has an unofficial “gray list” of words and phrases in nearly 30 languages that cannot be entered by swiping or appear during predictive typing. Researcher Derik Kauffman, who published a detailed list on the website swipeblocked.com, said the list contains about 100,000 words and phrases.

The list applies only to the swipe keyboard and predictive typing. The words and phrases themselves are not banned, and users can still enter them by tapping each letter individually.

Most of the phrases on the list are vulgar, offensive, or related to drugs, sex, or violence, but some are political. The list includes “Dictator Trump” and “Sleepy Joe,” a nickname Trump used for Joe Biden, according to Reuters, which was first to report on the list.

The English-language list also includes “right wing conspiracy,” “Tibetan independence,” and “United Ireland.” The Hindi list includes “Modi ​braggart,” a reference to Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi; the Hebrew list includes “occupied territories”; and the French list includes “immigration too high.”

The Russian-language list includes profanity and one phrase mentioning Putin

The list Kauffman published on his website includes 637 restricted Russian-language entries, most of them crude expressions.

Some phrases relate to military topics, including “send in troops,” as well as a reference to Russia’s 2008 war with Georgia: “wars with Georgia.”

Meduza found that the list also includes a phrase mentioning the Russian president: “Putin drove out.” It’s unclear what the phrase means.

Among other entries, the Russian-language list includes:

The researcher found the list after he was unable to swipe-type ‘white man’

Kauffman said he discovered Apple’s list in September, when he noticed that the system would freeze during swipe-typing whenever he tried to enter certain words, such as “bad boy” or “white man.” He also found that it would let him type similar words, including “bad girl” or “black man.”

To find the cause, Kauffman turned to AI programming tools — OpenAI’s Codex and Anthropic’s Claude Code — and discovered a list of restricted words and phrases “deep in the bowels” of the iOS operating system.

Matt Suiche, an engineer at the cybersecurity company Tolmo, confirmed Kauffman’s findings, saying he independently reconstructed the same “gray list” and compared it with Apple’s internal data.

Kauffman was far from the first to notice how iOS’s autocomplete feature works. Social media users have repeatedly complained in past years that they could not enter certain phrases by swiping, though it had not previously been reported that Apple maintains a separate list of restricted phrases.

Apple declined to comment on Kauffman’s findings or explain why certain political phrases are restricted. The company announced that iPhone users can always type specific words or phrases manually and reject any autocomplete suggestion at any time, adding that its keyboard is designed not to suggest options that could be inappropriate or offensive.

Apple, like other technology companies, has run into trouble in past years when its autocomplete feature suggested controversial phrases. Google’s predictive-text feature has also drawn criticism more than once over the search queries it suggested.

In 2025, a bug was noticed in Apple’s speech recognition feature: when users said the word “racist,” the word “Trump” (a reference to Donald Trump’s last name) would briefly appear on the screen. Apple explained the bug by saying that its speech recognition models can display words with some phonetic similarity.