No, Google Did Not “Ban” These Words

“‘Demerol,’ ‘Butt’ & ‘Preggers’ Among 1,400 Strange Words Google Bans on Android”

and

“Google’s Ridiculous List of Banned Words for Android Includes Uterus and Lactation”

This just didn’t sound right, so I went ahead and downloaded the source list from the Android source code.

I grabbed the Android English dictionary and isolated the 1400 or so words that were supposedly “banned” and started to look through them.

The first thing I noticed was the fact that their were random category parameters assigned to most words.

For reference, here is a raw paste of the list in plain text and a list of the words without parameters.

The categories were:

• offensive (184 entries)
• baby talk (111 entries)
• not a word (48 matches)
• medical (667 matches)
• hand added (19 matches)
• abbreviation (24 matches)

The banned Android list actually only has about 184 words marked as offensive.

The rest of the words did not have a category assigned to it.

For instance, Google has not banned the word “AMD” it is merely marked as an abbreviation.

Next thing I did was pull out my phone equipped with the latest version of Android.

I’ve known this for some time from learning about Google auto-complete within the search engine, but Google will not recognize or auto-complete a good number of offensive words.  In this case I tried a handful of the “offensive” words within the list and found this to be true.

I then tried both speaking and typing the word “Demerol” a word categorized as “medical” on the list, and found it to be good to go.

Summary

For one reason or another, Google has added these words to the auto-correct dictionary however only a small fraction of them appear to actually be “banned” when you actually try to use them.

Am I missing something here?

Patrick Coombe

Hello I'm Patrick Coombe and I'm the CEO and Founder of Elite Strategies, an agency I started in 2009. One of the main reasons I love blogging about SEO is the research it takes to come up with the posts. It allows me to not only write about what I love, but to learn more about the industry in the process. I hope you enjoyed this post, if you did consider sharing it or even better linking to it!