Does Microsoft have a list of blocked words like Apple does on the iPhone?
One of the more amazing examples of over-control by a software maker is the news that Apple has a ‘Kill List’ of words that it won’t spell-check. It seems that iOS v6 devices have a list of ‘sensitive’ words that the spellchecking system won’t allow to appear as a suggested correction.
Journalists noticed this when reporting on the recent events in the Texas State Legislature. They would type ‘abortiom’ or similar typing mistake but their iPhone would not make the obvious autocorrect suggestion. The Daily Beast tested iOS 6 and found many other words that were blocked.
That got us wondering if Microsoft might have done something similar in Microsoft Word? After all, we’ve all had some laughs at strange autocorrect suggestions and omissions from the supplied dictionary.
So we fired up Word 2013 with the default US English dictionary to see how Microsoft deals with the words that are on Apple’s Kill List.
The results are as expected, 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.
See Also
- Office for iPhone v1.2 secrecy
- Android banned word list in Word
- Free iWork apps for iPad and iPhone
- Why is an eighth grader smarter than Microsoft Word?
- Spell-checker pulps cookbook
- Klingon = Clinton
- Word’s problem with a possessive Donna
- The Cheese Shop and Microsoft Word
- Palin isn’t in the Word dictionary
- Inside the Word 2003 Thesaurus
- Office 2007 dictionary updates
