IOS – How to stop iPhone from making a specific autocorrection

autocorrectios

My iPhone almost always replaces the word make (lower-case) with the word Male (yes, with a capital M). I don't get auto-correct suggestion in a bubble. The change happens automatically immediately after I press the Space key after typing make.

I think this has been going on about 3-4 months. I’m wondering if I’m losing my mind. Almost every time I type the word make (including just there; I am typing this on my phone) it just magically changes to Male, and I have to select the word and manually retype it.

I‘ve checked in Settings app → General → Keyboard → Text Replacement, and there’s no such replacement defined.

So it seems my iPhone has just learned to do this, but I can’t think of any time I would have made this substitution myself.

Question: How can I fix this (without globally disabling auto-correction)?

Bonus points for curiosity: Why has my iPhone started doing this? I can’t see how it could learn to replace a very common word with a much less common word (with nonstandard capitalisation, at that). Seems like some kind of broken machine learning algorithm stuck in a weird self-affirming loop. But if so, why would this bug only manifest in a single persistent unwanted substitution? (My iPhone does seem to have reluctantly accepted that I rarely meant to type ducking, so clearly it can learn.)

Best Answer

If iOS is persistent in making this correction, make a text replacement:

https://support.apple.com/guide/iphone/use-text-replacements-iph6d01d862/ios

Put the correct text as both the replacement and the shortcut.