How to Correct Your Spelling on Devices (without Autocorrect)

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Have you ever sent a text and it’s either had a horrible misspelling or Autocorrect made it a completely different word?

And then yelled at the phone like it was all it’s fault? Yeah, me neither…

Autocorrect is quite possibly the world’s least reliable program ever. Okay, not that dramatic.

But it is pretty weird, and what’s worse is, the more you mistype a word, the more it wants to suggest the typo to you. I don’t need that kind of help.

But I am going to show you how you can have your device automatically correct your common typos using its own settings so you can turn off autocorrect for good! How cool is that?!

It only takes a few steps from you, but once you get it in order, you will be willing to give me your firstborn. Or at least something nice.

Regardless, I am pretty spoiled now that I have it on my phone, tablet, and computer.

If you like shopping online, this will save you time inputting your address, as well as making sure you input the info spelled correctly.

I will be posting photos in case you’re a visual person. The pictures will be from an iPhone, but I am sure it is available in Android devices, as well.

How to Use Text Replacement in iPhone

Go to the Settings app on your phone >General >Keyboard >Text Replacement. 

Now, you may see a blank screen, but I will show you mine, which is already full, and I will explain a few of the things in there and how I use them. 

iPhone screenshot

1. Spelling Correction. For some reason, when I got a larger phone, I could never hit my ‘n’ & ‘o’s correctly, and still can’t to this day.

So, since I often ended up typing “amd” or “ans” instead of “and”, I put in each of those as the term, and the “and” as what it changes it to.

Same for bery (very), coukd (could), and many more… 

2. Contractions: When I want to use a word with a contraction, but on the iPhone, it’s an extra step and slows me down. 

I use this trick to change things like cant to can’t, couldnt to couldn’t. Easy peasy. 

This will spoil you, but it’s awesome because it will also help you type faster on your phone. 

3. Autofill. I let it fill in words or phrases for me. 

A. Word shortcut: So, say I want to spell Christmas, but don’t want to do the whole ‘add a capital and then spell the whole word out’ routine. 

All I do is input cmas as my shortcut, and it’ll automatically fill in the word Christmas. 

B. Long Phrase or extra emojis: Or when I want to wish someone a Happy Birthday and want to have lots of celebration emojis behind it, I may say ‘Hope you have a Wonderful’… and then type bdd and it fills in –> Birthday!! 🎈💥🎉🍰🎁🎂🎊💥🎈’

This way, I don’t have to find each emoji every time I text someone or write on their facebook wall.

I also use this with my email addresses, as well as my mailing address.

So, if my address is 347 Randomspelling of Long Word St, I’ll put in 347 as my shortcut, and it’ll pop up with the rest!

This way, I will never mistype my email or mailing address ever again!

C. Menu Orders: Also, if you eat out a lot like we do, I sometimes have to text my husband what I want from a certain restaurant.

I have my Chipotle order in here, and so when I type in chipotle into the text box, it automatically populates my regular order.

I can edit that if I want to make additions or subtractions, but this is almost always what I get.

This feature also helps if you’re in sales or customer support and commonly have to type the same info repeatedly.

This little video may help illustrate how this all happens: 

How to Set Up Text Replacement

Okay, now that I’ve told you why to use this, let’s talk about how to set it up.

Note that this is for iPhone, iPads, and Mac computers, but it likely works on other phone models and tablets in a similar fashion.

First, go to the Settings app > General > Keyboard > Text Replacement.

At the top right, you will see a ➕ sign.

Click that and you will be taken to the input screen, as shown below.

iPhone text replacement screenshot

Then, just follow the directions as shown above: 1. Input your shortcut/misspelling in the Shortcut box, 2. input your correct spelling/expanded text in the Phrase box, and 3. click Save!

There you have it! So easy a caveman could … nevermind {remember that commercial?}. Anyone can do it!

It took me a little while to get all of my edits in, but now that I have them, I type much faster on my phone, and save my thumb ligaments! 👍

Anybody wanna thumbwrestle?!

Note: Whatever you put in your phone is your responsibility, including sensitive information.

And if you happen to use this as a prank on someone else, well, not only is that super childish (also hysterical), but that’s also on you 😉.

I hope this tutorial was helpful.  Please let me know in the comments below if you liked seeing things like this, I’d love to hear from you!  Thanks for reading!

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