What the Duck – How to Get Your Phone to Stop Autocorrecting ‘F–k’

We've all been there — you're in the middle of a heated conversation and you're trying to write a certain bad word, when your phone changes it to "ducking," a word much less-commonly used than the one we intended to write. So, here's how to get your phone to stop autocorrecting the word "fuck."

There's more than one method to fending off the "duck" once and for all. The first one is to simply go in through your phone's settings and manually change the keyword so that it isn't autocorrected — this method has pretty much always existed, but because of a certain tweet we recently saw, we know that there are people who are unaware of it. The tweet in question is also how we discovered the second strategy.

You may be wondering why the duck we're writing an article about this. To be blunt, the rock and metal community swear a lot, so we know the majority of you have probably come across this problem at one point or another. While a 2015 MusixMatch study revealed that hip hop contains more curse words than any other genre, metal was a close second. A word cloud that a  fan created back in 2019 showed that "fuck," "shit" and "hell" were among the most-commonly used words in Slipknot's lyrics, so we specifically have our eyes on you, Maggots.

Keep reading to learn the details about the different autocorrect-fighting strategies. We should note that these methods are meant for the iPhone.

Method 1 – Turn Autocorrect Off

This is pretty straightforward. Go into your phone's settings, then tap "General" and then "Keyboard." If the button next to Autocorrect is green, then it's on. Tap it to turn it off, and you'll be able to type "fuck" all you want. Although, it's important to note that this shuts off the feature completely, so any other spelling errors will be left for you to fix on your own whenever you type.

Method 2 – Adjust It in Text Replacement

Method No. 2 has been around as long as autocorrect has. You'll once again go into your settings and then tap "General" and then "Keyboard." One of the options at the top is called "Text Replacement," so you'll tap that and then be brought to another page. Here, you can edit and add different phrases that you want autocorrect to implement — so for example, "omw" is a standard Apple acronym for "On my way!" Whenever you type those three letters, your phone will change it to the phrase, unless you press the little "x" when the suggestion pops up.

In order to change "duck" to fuck," add the word duck to "Phrase" and then "fuck" to shortcut. This works for both words' "ing" counterparts as well, but with this strategy, it may be frustrating when you're actually trying to talk about a duck.

Method 3 – Add the Word As a Contact

Alas — we've come to the latest technique. Here, you'd simply add the word "fuck" as a contact in your phone, and then it will stop attempting to autocorrect the word to duck. It probably works for all the other cuss words as well, so go ahead and fill your contacts with number-less entries to your heart's desire. We've tried it, and it works.