iOS suggests address book names over dictionary words

iOS suggests corrections for words it believes are incorrect. Usually, this is a great help, because with auto-corect, one can type more quickly than one would otherwise be able to type. However, iOS often makes mistakes, correcting words that are already correct. A common example is that iOS almost always wants to change its to it’s. Enough people make the mistake of inserting an apostrophe in the possessive pronoun its without help from iOS; with iOS, the rate of these errors has only increased.

Recently, I have noticed that when I am typing using the Swedish keyboard, iOS attempts to correct perfectly good Swedish words, replacing them with names from my address book.

Here is an example. A few days ago I posted a comment on a photo that a friend posted of some freshly baked cinnamon buns. I wanted to post the Swedish sentence, “Dina kanelbullar are jättegoda.”

The word dina is the plural second person possessive pronoun in Swedish, and kanel is the word for cinnamon. Both are perfectly good Swedish dictionary words, but iOS nevertheless insists on trying to change them. Sina and Karl are names that appear in my address book.

iOS 5.1.1 suggests Sina instead of Dina.

iOS 5.1.1 tries to replace kanel with Karl.

I could understand this behavior if I were using the U.S. English keyboard, but it happens even when I use the Swedish keyboard as in these two examples. I have been unable to find a setting or option to change the auto-correct word list precedence so that dictionary words are preferred over address book words.