How To Swear On Android

There may be plenty of things you can do with Android, but swearing is definitely not one of them. While most of the time auto-prediction seems to know what you want to say before you do (and often even offers a better version of it), when it comes to using some of those “taboo” words” – you are left on your own.

You may be surprised to learn how many words are banned from Google’s auto-prediction. A few years back, a list of 1400 words that had been banned on Android KitKat appeared on Wired and caused quite a stir. Ranging from “butt” to “geek”, there sometimes seemed to be no definite set of rules guiding Google in their selection process. And while lots of questions were asked, little answer was given.

The ban on swearing extends across keyboard and voice inputs. What’s more, your “inappropriate” language may often be battled by auto-correct, suggesting milder and, occasionally, hilarious options as replacements. So if “duck you, man” is not expressive enough for you, you may want to tweak a few things on your phone to swear to your heart’s content.

Here’s how you enable swearing on Android.

What you will need to do is disable a naughty little feature called “Block offensive words” for both keyboard input and Google Now.

First, let’s head over to Settings>Language & Input> Google keyboard settings.

Scroll down until you see “text correction” as a menu item or as part of a bigger setting (depending on you phone model). There you will see “Block offensive words” , that will be turned on by default. Uncheck the option and you will be able to include swear words into your messages easily and might even see them pop up as suggestions from time to time.

When using Google Voice, you may have noticed that whenever you use a swear word, it will be showing up like this: f****. While this may be enough for most people to get the message, some of us prefer to be more…specific. If this is the case, let’s go ahead and uncheck “Block offensive words” for voice input as well. The process will be quite similar to the one we’ve gone through for enabling swear words in text messages. Go to Settings > Language & input > Google Voice. Choose the setting icon on the right, find the already familiar “Block offensive words” and uncheck it.

There you have it!