Hacksar

If you have a cell phone and find yourself texting often, you may have picked up on the phone’s special typing mode called “T9 Predictive Text”, where you basically hit each key once for each letter and it will automatically figure out what word you are trying to spell. It is also convenient in the fact that if a word that you are trying to spell isn’t found in the dictionary, you can switch to regular text input and type it in yourself, and it will automatically be added to the T9 word database.

However, this benefit is a double-edged sword. If you enter a mistyped word by mistake, or even if you type in some number by mistake, phones often set that number combination as the first entry in your T9 dictionary, and so it shows up every time you try to type anything with that key combination. Examples of this include having “86″ showing up instead of “to” or “47″ for “is”. This can become extremely annoying as you have to scroll through the other options to switch the word to the right one, as it can confuse your receiving party tremendously. You may have tried to find a way to delete your custom T9 dictionary, or even to edit the words found in it, but 99.9% of phones out there on the market today have no such capability. However, if you have this problem, there is a solution that works for ALL phones (even though it can be very tedious). Keep reading for the guide.

1. Create a new blank text message with your phone, and switch to regular text input.
2. Type in the word you want as it should appear, and then press the space button.
3. Switch back to T9, and type in the word again; press the Next button until the correct word shows up. DO NOT PRESS SPACE AFTER TYPING IT IN VIA T9 UNLESS THE CORRECT WORD IS SHOWING.
4. Once the right word is there, press space and do it again.
5. Repeat typing the word over and over and hitting “next” until the right word shows up first. This can take a very long time, depending on how many times you’ve misused it. (It personally took me 342 times to fix “86″ to “to”.) It can all be done in one text message, and the text can just be discarded (and not sent) when completed.
6. Type the word a few more times after it is correct just so that it sticks a little more.

What’s happening is that the phone remembers how many times you’ve used each word, and it puts the most frequently used words at the top of the “next” T9 predictive text list. By typing the corrected word over and over, you are moving it up in the list, and eventually above the erroneous word. You may be wondering why the wrong word got pushed up so high in the list in the first place, when you can only remember typing it once; that’s because T9 automatically puts new words that don’t exist in its dictionary automatically to the top, and once it is at the top, you probably mistyped it once, and then it just snowballed from there. You can’t actually delete any words from the T9 dictionary, but this is the only way to fix the problem on almost all the phones.

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