How to Easily Add Special Spellings to Your iPhone

Hey there!

I love using “bb” for “baby” and other “enhanced” spellings when I text. Especially when I’m texting with VO2GoGo clients.

And my daughters.

But awhile back, I had to figure out how to stop my iPhone from dutifully trying to auto-correct everything I typed. There’s an easy way to force your iPhone to learn a new spelling. To make exceptions.

It’s a little counter-intuitive, but it works like a charm.

Here’s how.

When texting, it’s often a time saver (and a cultural alignment) to abbreviate certain words and phrases. And as a VO artist, you might want to not have your iPhone insist on auto-correcting “protools” as “protocols.”

These are called “exceptions.”

Some of those text-y abbreviations are already in your iPhone’s dictionary, but some aren’t. If you want to add some of your own, you’ll quickly find that there’s no “Add spelling exception” option when you highlight text.

So here’s a way I found to instantly add your own custom spelling exceptions to your iPhone or iPad’s dictionary.

First, open your Contacts app and create a new contact. Make the first name “Custom” and the last name “Spellings”.

Then, for the name of the company, add any of the custom spellings you want, separated by commas and spaces. I have “bb.” “protools” and others in my Custom Spellings contact’s company.

See, your iPhone will automatically add any word in any Company you set in your contacts to it’s list of exceptions.

And when I am presented with another new one that the iPhone insists on correcting, I add it to the end of the list under Company in that contact.

There are a number of videos on YouTube that illustrate this. Here’s one of them (it’s an oldie, but still a goodie):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LaZLOY8_w-I

And that’s all there is to it! You can now safely type away, knowing that you can tell your bb how cool protools is without auto-correction interruptions.

Hope this helps.

David