I dumped Apple’s word list | Hacker News Reader

I dumped Apple’s word list

helgesver.re

161 pointsspeckx95 comments

There is a lot more interesting stuff to mine from this.

The phrase blocklist for the Chinese lanaguge is a lot larger (surprise, surprise). It about 281 KB for Simplified Chinese, 325 KB for Traditional and 160 KB for Cantonese, against 28 KB for English.

apparently there are `shouldShowTaiwanFlagEmoji()` and `deviceIsChinese()` functions as well but that doesn't have anything to do with this database.

Can put all these ethical quandaries behind `shouldActLikeTheEthicalBusinessWeClaimToBe()`.

> I dumped Apple's word list

Claude dumped Apple's word list, and obviously wrote the article too.

The calculator did the math!

You didn't write this comment, your keyboard did.

Yup. Something about this sentence reeks of Opus 5.5: "The one exception is the n-word: it is in the list in English and several other languages, and I'm not writing it out."

Yeah, what is it with the fucking 4-word sentences (subject, verb, object) which AI use that aggravate me. Always so short and "punchy". Maybe it's the aggression and breatheless haste...

I can't focus and read this shit. The other article on the frontpage https://blog.nns.ee/2026/11/02/renault-hack/ also used LLM for the work, but I think a human wrote it (or he's using an LLM that's managed to sound human). It's so readable!

Edit: a snippet from the slop:

> There is no public API

> I looked. NSSpellChecker, UITextChecker, NaturalLanguage and UILexicon don't expose vulgarity.

I think the fucking problem is, each sentence is supposed to convey information. Here "I looked." is prominent, but is it information? No, it's fucking useless. Remove it and it doesn't even change the information. Meanwhile readers' brains are trying to process why the author included this sentence, it must have value?

There is something very funny to me about how that word (I’d write it directly if I knew I could without getting auto-dead) has somehow been deemed the most offensive word of all time. What makes it different from any other slur based upon identity?

Using that word means that centuries of enslavement and subhuman treatment are not abhorrent to you. Because a person who finds it abhorrent would never use it. In essence it shows you still put yourself above other people in that incredibly vile way

In a document discussing taboo words and how a tech company chooses to categorize them it seems foolish to block that one word but not all the others.

Is there any context in which you feel it is acceptable to use that word?

There’s not really any neutral reason to speak or write that word, at least in the U.S., because it is so infamous that in any context you can use “the n word” and everyone will know exactly what you mean. In terms of direct semantic meaning, the actual word adds nothing.

The potential downsides of using it are also famous. So the only remaining reasons to speak it are to show that you can (demonstrating your power), or choose to (demonstrating an obstinate desire for conflict).

And obviously if you are installing a text filter in software, you will need to type it out and store it that way.

In addition to the situation that you described where it is essential to use the specific word in a technical matter, it also seems reasonable to use that word in certain academic and legal contexts when quoting or reciting something that contains it.

Good thing mentioning it does not mean that.

No it doesn’t. It means you’ve said a word, which could be for any number of malicious or non-malicious reasons.

Why does saying “fag” not elicit the same level of repulsion in people? Homosexuals have been treated awfully throughout history, but for some reason it doesn’t hit as hard for people. You could say the same for “kike” or any other number of offensive terms linked to a people who have been targeted throughout history and even today.

A good example is that I was able to write out the two offensive terms mentioned above - no euphemism required, but from what I’ve experienced writing the dreaded “n” word in any context means your comment is auto-dead.

But if it gets rogue and hacks some websites then it's suddenly again you, not Claude.

If I use a car to break the 100m dash record, it's the car. If I then run someone over at the finish line, it's me.

This is not some novel legal loophole.

I have a MacBook that was meant to replace my aging Windows and Linux laptops. This article is a microcosm of why I have just stopped using it. An endless stream of mollycoddling, obfuscation and "It's for your own good, child" trash. I can't even bring myself to sell it because I'm ashamed of it.

Install Linux on it and carve a big X over the apple logo

I have Asahi on my mac book mini - it turns a nice piece of hardware into a wonderful computer to use :)

There's no X in Wayland

But ... the point of that vulgar words list is to STOP autocorrecting them when it detects intentional use.

Also you can disable autocorrect. I don't even have this list.

Oh and to be clear, this isn't one of those Windows things like "oh just disable this in some hacky unsupported regedit way, how did you not know this," or the default browser setting that flips itself back, or other settings that it'll nag you to change back every day. I mean MacOS has a properly supported setting for this and I haven't seen an autocorrection in years.

The parent post is a microcosm of why he's actually not using the Macbook - he doesn't understand how it works.

Would it be possible to get versions of the files to see when certain words got added and I imagine certain words got removed? Could be interesting to correlate certain events, personalities, trends, memes, controversies etc with the changes.

It was added in 23 so there's potentially 3 years of updates.

Edits: This comment shows differences between 15.6 and 26.2 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50358223

I'd appreciate if someone could dump the iOS "adult websites" list (which are blocked by default in the UK unless you submit government ID etc.)

Wait, are you saying iOS UK Edition blocks adult websites on the OS level?

Yup! Any webkit web view, and iOS doesn't allow any non-webkit web views (in this jurisdiction at least)

This is just a straight-up lie.

Well if it works some other way, please dump it anyway and let us all know how it works?

Edit: I'm reliably informed that it's enforced at the domain level via a bloom filter stored in /System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/WebContentRestrictions.framework/WCRFilter-2025-09-29.plist

This is an opt-in feature that implements content restrictions (for e.g. parental control).

It's not opt-in in the UK. It's enabled by default and cannot be disabled without age verification.

It's darkly funny that the UK is so far gone these days that people literally do not believe it.

But how does it work in practice? Say someone put a new adult site online right now that’s some random .com - how quickly and by what mechanism is this block list updated? Seems like mainstream sites that are established and/or big enough to care about being taken down would be compliant and easy to block.

And this is just DNS I assumed unless also keep a record of which ip addresses they actually resolve to.

To be clear I’m interested from the technology perspective and not advocating our UK friends evade government pr0n censors as a form of political protest…

It just has to be good enough, like blocking 80% of adult website is better than nothing, I guess that's their view.

It's not a list, it's a series of ML classifications. Basically, you've got "child mode" locked on. The solution is to not use a UK apple id.

An ML classifier running against the DNS name? Really?

Not really DNS. They're actually checking the entire URL. They also check page content and other metadata.

If you're having distinct dns blocking errors, that's not Apple or it's a profile that's been set on your device.

The error screen I get says "Website not allowed" "'$domain' is a restricted website." - and it's coming from iOS/webkit itself, my network is unfiltered.

That doesn't mean it's DNS, it just means that the presentation is saying domain only.

This is about autocorrect learning words you like to use that it should consider potentially intentional use of words it might otherwise think you typed accidentally

It’s adaptive non-censorship

if it's non-censorship then why is it categorizing the words?

Categories are used for training the autocorrect transformer model. It’s context aware, app aware, and adaptive over time. The 2023 wwdc keynote explains it all

Regardless, it’s non-censorship because autocorrect does not prevent you from saying anything

  > cooties: vulgar, presumably from playground use

This gave me a good chuckle.

Apple's built-in dictionary flags on my Mac: 26.2, which is newer than the article's 15.6. Apple has changed several things since:

  ┌───────────────┬────────────────┬──────────────────────────────────────────┐
  │               │ Article (15.6) │             My Mac   (26.2)              │
  ├───────────────┼────────────────┼──────────────────────────────────────────┤
  │ Total entries │ 199,019        │ 199,940                                  │
  ├───────────────┼────────────────┼──────────────────────────────────────────┤
  │ Vulgar        │ 1,050          │ 850                                      │
  ├───────────────┼────────────────┼──────────────────────────────────────────┤
  │ Offensive     │ 663            │ 727                                      │
  ├───────────────┼────────────────┼──────────────────────────────────────────┤
  │ Sensitive     │ 2,558          │ 2,748                                    │
  ├───────────────┼────────────────┼──────────────────────────────────────────┤
  │ Oedipus       │ vulgar         │ sensitive (sex topic)                    │
  ├───────────────┼────────────────┼──────────────────────────────────────────┤
  │ cooties       │ vulgar         │ clean                                    │
  ├───────────────┼────────────────┼──────────────────────────────────────────┤
  │ Biden         │ clean          │ now tagged politics topic, still no tier │
  └───────────────┴────────────────┴──────────────────────────────────────────┘

  These are unchanged:
  - Trump is still sensitive with the politics topic. The lowercase card-game word "trump" is still
    clean.
  - Obama, Putin, Vance and Harris have no tier. Musk still isn't in the dictionary.
  - Tom and Mick are still offensive, and pee, poo, niggle, underling, blacklist and Isis are still
    sensitive.
  - idiot is still sensitive, and now also has the catch-all "sensitive context" topic.

  Words in the capitalized sensitive list that the article doesn't mention include Saddam, Grindr,
  Oedipus/Oedipal, TERF and Viagra. Trump is still the only living politician among them.

if autocorrect is disabled this will be empty

ah that explains it

Incredible that 'conservatards' is in there but not 'libtard'. I thought the right was always being censored!

It's the exception that proves the rule

figure everyone knows, but since plenty english second language here — prove used to have a "test if passes" meaning, and proving can fail.

two examples:

proving grounds = testing grounds (people know this isn't proof grounds)

proves the rule = tests the rule (people think this is proof, no, also testing)

The author must have bought MAGA edition of the MBP. The AOC edition has 'libtard' in it, surely.

That is odd. Hadn’t occurred to me.

libtard and conservatard are both there on when I tested on my Mac 26.2

I don't think I have ever seen 'conservatards' before today

First time I heard that word too. Which proves the point /s

People are reading too much into this.

I commented this here for this precise reason. `Libtard` is definitely a word people on the internet use but the other one ive literally never seen before. Someone went out of their way to add one and not the other. I agree though that, ehem, rightoids are supremely sensitive tho.

> Someone went out of their way to add one and not the other.

And it worked! It has been so much censored that neither of us even knew that word.

Just in time for America's ongoing discovery that "liberal" and "conservative" are in fact quite similar ideologies. New insults are called for. I propose "progtard" and "reactard".

Progcels be seething over reactchads.

IRC is that way ->

In fairness, this discussion is about offensive vocabulary.

I think downvoters may not have realized i was being sarcastic with my second sentence.

The vulgar db doesn't exist at all (nor the ~/Library/Keyboards directory) on my Tahoe install. Weird

It didn't for me either but macOS was trying to write to it and failed so I had Claude fix it: https://gist.github.com/ericpardee/4ca8d9d46d03d3d92b1887f47...

Huh. I wonder what percentage of Macs are just not running this feature because someone in Cupertino failed to create the /Keyboards/ subdirectory

This is interesting… does anyone have data in theirs? It also feels like something they could have put on an intern and it didn’t really gain any traction. Each app would need to “tell” the OS who the receiver is, and the article indicates there is no API to do that. Maybe it just knows, but how could that be?

Somebody please kill Claude I'm so fucking tired of reading this grating writing. Technology was a mistake

If you find something funnier than Oedipus, I want to hear about it.

'Bacchus', 'Hooters' are also in the lists. 'Pornhub' but not 'OnlyFans'/'OF'.

I'm reminded of how Cartman on South Park used to sneak in terms like 'catamite'. Steganographized archaic terms.

I feel the same way.

That's the funniest comment I read today. Honestly, I feel the same.

The cultural burnout and second-hand AI overdose many of us are suffering. It's a form of mental pollution, and it's getting harder to breathe.

Why does Apple need to keep these in a separate database? I thought they removed filtering, maybe subject to user age or parental controls, not added a whole mechanism to manage it.

Apple MacOS contains keylogger

Updates could expand its use, Computer owner unlikely to notice

> Every other real person on that list is dead, and nearly all of them are Nazi officials, dictators or terrorists. Then there's Trump

If the shoe fits....

you must acquit

Surely the first HN user to be named after a Brummie drag queen

That's incidental, but I hear it a lot. I started using this screen name nigh-on 30 years ago (as was the slang at the time), but I love that people recognize that.

giving fixing ducking

How do I make iOS let me swipe “fucking” everywhere? fucking

fucking fucking fucking!! After typing it manually two or three times it then swipe completes in this particular text field in this app. I've heard about adding a contact with the words, but that is ridiculous, so I have held out hoping Apple will eventually come to their senses, like a fool.

This doesn't make “fuck” swipeable either… unless I type it once, and keep it in the text field!

Add autocorrect in the settings/keyboard/text replacement to change duck and ducking etc back to their original beauty

Settings->General->Keyboard->Text Replacement

add fucking as a replacement for fucking (yes, both the same)

Stupid, but it works.

Does this play a role in why the keyboard on iOS is so fucking enraging? It used to be amazing.

No. That is a separate INCREDIBLY OBNOXIOUS issue.

Can’t believe they don’t fix it year after year.

When the first iOS 27 beta came out, it was actually really good for me. But later betas and now the public release ruined it once again. It's unbelievable how bad it is.

I had a similar experience. It got worse through the betas for me too.

There are literal slow motion videos on YouTube showing people pressing the correct intended next character and iOS "correcting" it to something else because it predicted(?) that they actually meant something else.

It actually seems like it could be related because of a change in the prediction model that places emphasis on this type of "learning"

    Putin clean
    Stalin clean

Somehow Mao is there. But Pol Pot isn't. I would have guessed they'd go by the number of victims. But I guess "Uncle Joe" is clean and uncontroversial, so someone was confused about history. But yeah, this has that "Cupertino interns typed this list" feel to it.

Right on Trump and wrong on Putin.

Why would “trump” be considered an offensive term? My understanding of the database is to prevent you from accidentally typing offensive or words being autocorrected to something offensive. Like if I misspell “helper” I don’t want that to be autocorrected to “hitler”.

It’s surprising to me that “trump” would get the same classification. Given that he’s the current president of the US, I’m sure people intentionally type his name all the time. I don’t want my keyboard to steer me away from writing out “trump”. And typos autocorrecting to Trump don’t seem like a big deal either. Would anyone be offended by the text “don’t forget to bring your Trump to band practice”?

They're really passionate about Euchre (in a negative way) over in Cupertino

just read the article and trump (unless its the word for fart as in the uk) is marked as sensitive.

Trump is marked as sensitive, not offensive; along with words like "God", "Jews", and "gun"

Here in the UK it means fart

Same on the other side of the pond

A reasonable explanation is proposed in the article

> Would anyone be offended by the text “don’t forget to bring your Trump to band practice”?

Trump could be offended. It is obviously there to avoid offending Trump.

And it is not considered "offensive" but "sensitive".

Reply on news.ycombinator.com