Text message screenshot where autocorrect changes 'castle' to 'casket' in a romantic message.

Autocorrect

2010catchphraseclassic

Published October 29, 2026

Autocorrect is the phone and word processor feature that silently rewrites typos into their nearest dictionary match, with results like 'duck' filling in for a less polite verb. The Guardian flagged a June 2008 American Family Association blunder that turned sprinter Tyson Gay's name into the headline 'Homosexual eases into 100 final at Olympic trials,' and by October 2010 the blog Damn You Autocorrect was collecting embarrassing SMS screenshots from readers.

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Overview

Posts in this format are almost always SMS screenshots where one wrong word replacement derails the entire message, followed by the sender's panicked recovery line3. Common beats include 'duck' filling in for the F word and iOS pushing proper nouns like 'Homosexual' where 'Gay' was typed1.

The humor sticks because the punchline is written by the phone, not the sender. Damn You Autocorrect and Cheezburger's Autocowrecks sorted reader submissions by category, from dating fails to parent-child texts5.

Origin & Background

Platform
iPhone SMS screenshots / Tumblr (viral spread)
Date
2010

Autocorrection shipped with Microsoft Word 97 in 1998, long before touchscreens made it a household joke7. The first mainstream story about autocorrect going wrong came from The Guardian in June 2008, after the American Family Association's news site globally replaced 'gay' with 'homosexual' and published 'Homosexual eases into 100 final at Olympic trials' about sprinter Tyson Gay1. That November, Flickr user Merrick Monroe uploaded one of the earliest widely-shared iPhone screenshot examples, a conversation the autocorrect function had rewritten into nonsense8.

How It Spread

Discussion picked up on the Mac Rumors forum in June 2009 as iPhone owners compared their worst suggestions9. New York Times columnist David Pogue published a column of reader-submitted 'autocorrect follies' sent to him via Twitter on June 21, 20102, which inspired the single-topic Tumblr Stupid Autocorrect that September. Stupid Autocorrect posted eleven times in its first day before going quiet until February 201110.

Two dedicated submission sites arrived in late 2010: Damn You Autocorrect in October, with F You Auto Correct following in November5. Cheezburger launched its Autocowrecks vertical in 20116. On December 5, 2012, Mashable rounded up Damn You Autocorrect's funniest texts of the year based on Facebook shares, tweets and page views4. By late 2012, Buzzfeed, Funny or Die, Complex, Glamour and Cracked all published their own autocorrect roundups, and the Facebook fan page Autocorrect Fails had collected more than 78,000 likes by January 14, 20135.

Timeline

1998

Autocorrection ships with Microsoft Word 97 as an office productivity feature.

2009-06

Mac Rumors forum threads about iPhone autocorrect suggestions begin circulating.

2011

Cheezburger launches the Autocowrecks vertical.

2012-12-05

Mashable publishes Damn You Autocorrect's nine funniest texts of 2012.

How to Use This Meme

People typically screenshot a botched SMS thread on an iPhone or Android device, obscure identifying names if needed, and post it to Tumblr or Instagram with the hashtag '#autocorrect,' or submit it to a dedicated site like Damn You Autocorrect3. The punchline is usually the sender's follow-up message trying to walk back whatever the phone said.

Frequently Asked Questions