How can I get the iPhone to “forget” certain words?

Question

The auto-complete features can be nice, but somewhere along the line my iPhone has learned some questionable language. How can I get the iPhone to "forget" certain words from its auto-complete settings / dictionary?

Answer 1

It sounds like it used to be possible to manually edit the user dictionary, but unfortunately it isn't anymore.

Just a guess, but perhaps you can have it forget them the same way it learned them — when it suggests the word, try tapping on the small [x] next to the suggestion. If you do this a few times it may "forget" the word.

You can reset the dictionary entirely by going to Settings > General > Reset:

Answer 2

You can either erase all learned words by going to Settings > General > Reset > Reset Keyboard Dictionary, or you can have your iPhone automatically censor out bad language that you type. To do the latter, go to Settings > General > Keyboard > Edit. You can then set a "censor" for bad language. What you could do is create a new shortcut for when you type the Phrase "cheese", it'll automatically Shortcut to "ch***e."

Answer 3

Short of a reset (as the other answers mentioned) or jail breaking, you can't :-(

There are a lot of tips to tuning it in this GigaOm article (including the name of the file to edit if you do jailbreak).

You can tune it by typing a word and insisting it is correct, you can add a word manually Through a somewhat hidden feature in international keyboard settings, but annoyingly the only way to make it forget is to forget everything.

Answer 4

The easiest way is to reset the keyboard dictionary:

Settings → General → Reset → Reset Keyboard Dictionary

Answer 5

For completeness, there's also this option which will make it not replace any words:

Turn off Auto-Correction:

1. Launch the Settings app
2. Go to General > Keyboard
3. Turn off Auto-Correction

Answer 6

I opened notes, typed the word I wanted and when the incorrect autocorrect showed I pressed the cross. I pressed space bar and repeated the process 8 times. On the 9th time the incorrect suggestion stopped showing. Now it doesn't suggest the incorrect word anywhere!

Answer 7

Go to Settings--General--Keyboard--Add New Shortcut

Put the CORRECT word in the phrase spot and the misspelled word in Shortcut spot. Every time you type the word the phone wants to autocorrect with the misspelled word, it will automatically default to the CORRECT spelling! It doesn't remove the word from the dictionary, but it beats the phone at its own game!