Researcher Decodes iOS Keyboard Blocklist: 4,513 English Phrases
Software / news
Researcher Decodes iOS Keyboard Blocklist: 4,513 English Phrases
Derik Kauffman's Swipeblocked project recovers the fingerprint tables behind Apple's predictive text from iOS 27.0, and its own README says a phrase's presence does not show why Apple listed it.
Independent researcher Derik Kauffman has published a decoded list of 4,513 English phrases that the iOS keyboard will not suggest, along with similar lists for 27 other languages and scripts. His site, Swipeblocked, says the data comes from iOS 27.0 and Apple's language downloads "as served in October 2026."
Reuters reported the findings on Nov. 6. Apple told the news agency the keyboard was "designed to avoid suggesting potentially inappropriate or offensive language," and that users can still type any word and override suggestions, according to IBTimes' account of the Reuters report.
How the list was recovered from fingerprints
Apple does not ship the list as readable text. Swipeblocked says Apple stores fingerprints rather than words, and the project's GitHub README explains the rest: each table is a minimal perfect hash with one 32-bit Jenkins lookup3 fingerprint per slot.
That means the researcher cannot read the list. He has to guess phrases and test them. The code names tokens, then searches keys exhaustively where the space is small enough, with a default budget of 10^12 tuples. Longer keys get heuristic searches, and every hit must pass an exact membership test that mirrors the keyboard's own lookup.
A detail only the README gives: Apple's build hashes key bytes as signed char, which changes the result for some IDs. The code is MIT-licensed. The word lists under data/ are extracted from Apple's own keyboard lexicons and are included so others can reproduce the results.
What is complete and what is not
English is the only language fully recovered. The README lists 28 languages in total, and its own tally shows how uneven the work is.
- Complete (English)1 languages
- Shipped words, partial long tables13 languages
- Shipped lexicons7 languages
- Partly readable3 languages
- Unsupported4 languages
Source: Swipeblocked GitHub README (derikk/swipeblocked), accessed 2026-11-09
Kauffman estimates about 100,000 entries and variations across all languages, not counting Chinese characters, but says the counting method can change that total, per IBTimes. The Hebrew list has six entries. The site warns that lists are incomplete wherever entries could not be decoded.
Examples, and how they behave on a phone
The examples in coverage mix profanity, drugs, sex and violence with politics and public figures. Behaviour is inconsistent, which is the more useful finding for anyone who types on an iPhone.
| Phrase | Observed behaviour |
|---|---|
| "Sleepy Joe" | Swiped as "Sleepy hope" |
| "United Ireland" | Often produced "United Iceland" |
| "Dictator Trump" | Swipeable, but keyboard used lowercase "trump" and suggested "dictator trumps" |
| "read smut" | Swipeable |
| "read gay smut" | Not swipeable |
All five rows are as reported by IBTimes from Reuters. The Jerusalem Post adds that Kauffman's swipe-typing stuttered on "bad boy" and "white man" but not "bad girl" or "black man," which is how he noticed the list in September. Reuters tested a small subset on an iPhone and found the phrases hard to swipe-type or missing from autocomplete.
Swipeblocked's own README is blunter about its limits than the headlines are. Results show table membership, not Apple's source spelling, and one compact ID can stand for unrelated words. A phrase's presence says nothing about why Apple added it. The researcher also cautions that some entries may come from broader word patterns rather than individual selection, and that not every recovered phrase has been tested on a device.
Who has weighed in
Matt Suiche, an engineer at the security company Tolmo, independently recovered the list and said it "closely matched Kauffman's results," per IBTimes. Kauffman used OpenAI's Codex and Anthropic's Claude Code to investigate, according to the Jerusalem Post, and called the list "a very light-touch form of censorship."
David Greene, senior counsel at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, told Reuters: "This is something that should not be secret." The Next Web reports Apple did not explain why political expressions appear.
Readers tracking Apple's other platform changes can find them in The Terminal's coverage of the Siri developer preview and the Taiwan App Store fee dispute; neither involves the keyboard.
The repository states the iOS 27.0 built-in English tables are newer than any served asset and need a local copy to recover, so the next test is whether Apple's shipping tables differ from the downloaded ones.
Sources
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