For example, if I spell “umportant”, it’s easy for us to recognise that it’s supposed to be “important”, but autocorrect insists that it’s something like “umbrella”, or I guess more logically “unimportant”, even though “important” is only 1 correction away.
​
These are real examples from my phone (Samsung Galaxy):
​
Wuick gets the suggestions Wicked, Which, Wucky, Whickham, Whicker, Wick, Wickets, Wicket, and Wickham. None of which are “Quick”, what I intended to write.
​
Nrown gets the suggestions Now, Nr own, Noon, Nowhere, Nr owner, Nr owns, and Nr owners. None of which are “Brown”.
​
Dence gets the suggestions Dance, December, Denied, Dancers, Decent, Dense, Dench, and Deuce. None of which are “Fence”.
​
It’s bothered me for years that it never ever picks up on a misspelt first letter.
​
Edit: I tried “umportant”, and it actually comes with 0 suggestions. Not umbrella, not unimportant, not even “important”. But “inportant” and “ikportant” and even “iqportant” are all recognised as “important”.
In: Technology
The point of autocorrect is to help you spell words you don’t know how to spell. Programmers generally assume you know the first letter, and that even if you made a typo, for that letter you know how to fix it.
So they programmed autocorrect to assume the first letter is correct.
If they didn’t, then when you didn’t know how to spell a word, you’d have to deal with loads of suggestions for words that start with the wrong letter.
Say you type “hense”, you want it to suggest “hence” not “dense” “tense” “sense” or “mense”, and you’d probably be a little irritated at having to scroll through those suggestions.
Latest Answers