Summarize this for a high school graduate:
Text Replacement
TextReplacement
Declare a Personalized Vocabulary across Apple’s OSs with Text Replacement.
If you’re like me, your cumulative experience of typing on iPhones for more than a decade is probably saturated with needlessly disruptive, unsolicited, and inaccurate autocorrection. Certain proper nouns and a dozen or so quasi-localized dialectal terms in our day-to-day writing/speech have been treated by the system’s autocorrect as foreign objects, regardless of how frequently we use them. Technically, this isn’t supposed to happen, but – if you’ve got the patience and the time – there’s a native feature across iOS, iPadOS, and macOS that allows you to declare your own user dictionary called Text Replacement.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=4Pu4VCiApMU
You can find the Text Replacement menu on iOS – as pictured in the screenshot embedded above – by navigating to General ⇨ Keyboard ⇨ Text Replacement or (maybe) by tapping this link. If you think you might use it often, I’d suggest installing this Siri Shortcut I created that navigates directly to the Text Replacement menu. To be honest, I’ve no idea what you’ll find there if you’ve never created a single entry and – since there’s no way to import or export from the menu – I’m not willing to delete all of mine to find out.
TextReplacementEntry
Tap the plus (+) symbol in the upper right hand corner of this menu and you should find yourself on a screen identical to the one shown in the screenshot embedded above, with two text entry fields labeled Phrase and Shortcut. To simply define a phrase – like “Extratone,” for instance, we needn’t actually use the latter, though I almost always do. I would suggest making two entries for those terms that aren’t always lowercase/uppercase – Extratone and extratone.
My suggestion: you needn’t waste too much time sitting and noodling over potential entries. Instead, try to notice the next time you encounter a frustrating misapplication of autocorrect. Add the Siri Shortcut I shared above to your homescreen so that you can quickly access the menu in this situation. Adding a single word shouldn’t take you more than a few seconds, this way.
Here’s the result of my continuing this practice for the past few years:
https://gist.github.com/extratone/3c7788e41d32958a04a2ab693fe0512c
Text Expansion
The goal of this guide was to help those experiencing repeated incorrect autocorrect actions, but Text Replacement’s explicit purpose is also worth consideration. Similar in function to a favorite third-party app of mine called Text Expander, you can also use Text Replacement to create text shortcuts to lengthy/tedious/otherwise difficult to replicate text strings. This includes emojis! As you’ll note in the Gist embedded above, my typing out moyai with replace the text “moyai” with “🗿.” In order to escape the shortcut and simply print the word “moyai,” all I need to do is tap the esc key on my keyboard or the x in the upper right hand corner of the autocorrect object. See this demonstrated in my video guide and/or the GIF embedded below:
https://imgur.com/gallery/K3EWBqh
What I forgot to mention in the video is that the Text Replacement dictionary is persistent by default across iOS, iPadOS, and macOS via iCloud. You’ll find the menu in the las…
