Wirebook › Glossary › Autocorrect
What is an autocorrect?
In one sentence: Software that rewrites what you type — fixing spelling, and sometimes turning an emoji into a plain word.
A little more
Autocorrect watches what you type and rewrites words it thinks are misspelled. On phones it also learns your habits. That is why it can fix teh into the — and why it sometimes changes a name, a password attempt, or even an emoji into a plain word it prefers.
When an emoji becomes letters (pizza picture to the word pizza), autocorrect or an input method is a prime suspect. Undo, a long-press suggestion bar, or switching the keyboard language often shows what it did.
It's a bit like… A helpful friend who finishes your sentences — usually right, occasionally so wrong it starts a mystery.
See it in action
- BonusWho stole all the emojis?Interview four suspects in a Byte Bakery chat heist, X-ray the fake paw prints, and discover how autocorrect and a spam cleaner teamed up to frame the cat.7 min · interactive
- BonusWhy can two passwords look the same but only one works?Drag a magnifying glass over a pretend message to reveal glowing ghost footprints left by invisible Unicode characters, read a plain-words card for what each blank does, paste any text into an X-ray, repair broken messages while keeping ordinary spaces, and solve three cases where a password, filename or file looked identical but wasn't..7 min · interactive