Checking the Google ‘bad’ word list in Microsoft Word.
The latest release of Google’s Android has a list of blocked words that won’t show up as suggested autocomplete as you type.
Back in July 2013 we told you about the ‘kill list‘ of words on Apple iOS devices. It’s a list of words which iPhone or iPad won’t show as suggested spellings as you type.
In both cases, these lists seem to be arbitrarily and inconsistently compiled.
For example ‘Sunni’ and ‘Iftar’ are on the blocked list but other Islam related words like ‘Shia’ are not. ‘Morphine’ is blocked but ‘Marijuana’ and ‘Bong’ are not.
Again, we’re interested to see how Microsoft Word deals with words that Google thinks we need protection from. So we put together a quick list of some of the curious Android ‘bad’ words to see what Office suggests as alternative spellings, if anything.
We did a similar thing when the Apple kill list was revealed. We’ve all had some laughs at strange autocorrect suggestions and omissions from the Microsoft supplied dictionary.
As you can see, two words are not in the US English dictionary but the others are listed and all show up in suggested spelling lists.
Word does NOT seem to discriminate or have a list of unacceptable words.
The software looks at each word typed, if it doesn’t appear in the dictionary it’ll put in a red squiggly line. The spelling suggestions seem to be based purely on finding the nearest match to what you’ve typed. If there’s some censorship going on, we could not find it and it’s different from what Apple appears to be doing.
Unlike the Apple list, Google lets you disabled the block list from Settings | Language & Input | Google Keyboard | Block offensive words.
Since Android is an open source system, the block list is available to developers unlike the Apple list which is kept secret.
