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You have no doubt had the shame of sending a text with a glaring mistake or the experience of trying to figure out why someone is suddenly texting you about ducks. While human error is inevitable, some of the tools we build for ourselves, like autocorrect, don’t always work as intended.

The “Autocorrect Fails” Facebook group is dedicated to those hilarious moments when your phone’s software decides to change a normal text into something very different. So get comfortable as you scroll through, upvote your favorites, and be sure to double-check your spelling before you comment your thoughts below.

More info: Facebook

#1 My Brother Was Trying To Text Me That He Would “Be By In A Minute” But His Phone Had Other Plans

Image credits: Crystal Hennessey

#2 Sent Some Texts To My Employees After Setting The Shift To Give Them The Rundown For The Night. I Was In A Hurry To Get Out Of There And Didn’t Want To Get Stuck On The Phone. I Wanted To Let Him Know They Would Only Have Six Staff Until 6 Pm. Oops. Anonymous Post Bc Of My Job

Image credits: Anonymous participant

#3 Asked My Husband About Dinner Plans. He Had An Interesting Declaration In Response

Image credits: Savannah Elizabeth

For ages, people have tried to find ways around the simple fact that most people, professionals included, will repeatedly make spelling mistakes in anything they write. This is why editors, proofreaders, and entire software companies like Grammarly still exist. Let’s face it, often we are in a hurry when we need to write something and the result can be all the hilarity we can see here.

The root of many of these issues, as well as better-publicized examples, comes from the simple problem of the spellchecker or autocorrect having an incomplete list of words. One of the most famous examples of this goes all the way back to at least 2007 when multiple people online noticed that many automated spellcheckers only knew the word “cooperation” when it was spelled without the hyphen.

#4 Me Trying To Date….yeah This Is Going Well

Image credits: Lyn Rumbaugh

#5 Newbie Here! I Sent This To My Husband Yesterday. It Was Early And I Was At Work At Tired. I’m Up At 2 Am To Start Work A 3 Am

Image credits: Heather Feather

#6 Watch Out For Those Lizards

Image credits: Brian Rowe

Older lists of words would only have “co-operation,” so when certain computers saw this word, they believed that it was simply a mistake. And for some reason, the “nearest” word to this mistake was “Cupertino,” the name of a town in California. The result was various, very official documents containing phrases like “South Asian Association for Regional Cupertino” and “presentation on African-German Cupertino”.

#7 #streak2

Image credits: Miguel Andrei Lofstrand

#8 This Was Rather Embarrassing

Image credits: Danielle Nicole

#9 Say What?

Image credits: Douglas Miller

To this day, this issue is referred to as the “Cupertino effect” which, simply put, is the often hilarious result of a spellchecker not having a word in its dictionary and making an “interesting” substitution. Other famous examples include Routers publishing an article where the “Muttahida Qaumi Movement” became the “Muttonhead Quail Movement.”

#10 Asking My Daughter To Bring Me Red Licorice To The Hospital

Image credits: Susan Nelson Trudell

#11 Nauseous Morning T*ts…i Guess It’s A Thing

Image credits: Lynne Mason

#12 Sorry

Image credits: Patty Hanson

However, the “Cupertino effect” pales in comparison to the “Scunthorpe problem.” I’ll give you a moment to figure it out, it’s in the name. Long story short, the entire town of Scunthorpe struggled to create AOL accounts using their town’s name because the site’s filters kept detecting profanity.

#13 Craigslist For Everything

Image credits: Tim Scott

#14 The Most Awkward Meeting After This

Image credits: Chelsea Himes

#15 Lol

Image credits: Blair Lynn

This issue is quite persistent, as lists of “banned words” are not static and constantly evolve. At the same time, this means more, unrelated words, like Scunthorpe, end up getting incorrectly flagged. The solution tends to be constant human intervention, something that spellcheck was invented to prevent.

#16 Haha

Image credits: Colleen Szeifried

#17 Cool

Image credits: Mandy Murphy

#18 When You’re Having A Conversation With A Base Supervisor From Another Company About Fitted Sheets And There’s The Most Epic Fail Ever

Image credits: Courtney Noel

Other famous examples include shiitake mushrooms being misspelled, with a missing “i” and this word being marked as profanity. Fortunately, this particular instance has managed to rectify itself, as more people are familiar with the correct spelling of this Japanese word, as food blogging has taken off.

#19 Well Duck My Life. Hate New Phones

Image credits: Brenton Lee

#20 Omg

Image credits: Patty Hanson

#21 Text From My 10 Yr Old!!! I Laughed Way Too Hard At This!

Image credits: Jennifer Phillips

Similarly, one Twitter (now X) user from Luxembourg, having just created an account, tweeted (an apt use for the verb) “Finally! A pair of great tits (Parus major) has moved into my birdhouse!” and had their account banned almost instantly. Interestingly, upon review, Twitter support declined to unban the account.

#22 My Auto Correct Cracks Me Up

Image credits: KelLy Sct

#23 Not Exactly Autocorrect Fail, But A Google Assistant Fail

Image credits: Hazel Foster-Skinner

#24 I Had To Join To Share This Classic Conversation Between My 20 Year Old And Myself This Morning. Apparently The Nightclub Offers Krispy Koreans

Image credits: Gina Ramsay

However, our text messages tend to not fall under such scrutiny, so spellcheck still insists on ducks ducking all over the place, even when not a single bird is present. As always with fails (spellcheck insists on “failure” but we all know it’s something else,) it really depends on where you are sitting. When it happens to you, it’s a tragedy, but hysterical when it happens to someone else.

#25 When You Talking To Your Client And Auto Correct Gets In The Way!!

Image credits: Colleen Stafford

#26 Sorry

Image credits: Nicole Freeman

#27 Gonna Go And Do Some Thugs Now

Image credits: Cassie Mattern

More commonly, it’s not so much that we misspell words, but that we over-rely on predictive text. Often it’s great, allowing us to fill in simple emails in moments, to keep some momentum going when writing certain sentences. But if you get used to it, predictive text becomes a crutch, with the writer simply missing the mistakes or misplaced words it gives and leaving it in the text.

#28 This Is A Text I Sent To My Daughter Last Year…fail

Image credits: Colleen Eckman

#29 An Actual Conversation With My Ex. I’m The Blue

Image credits: Nimbus Cloud

#30 Texts Between My Brother And My Mom

Image credits: Shannon Regan

Unfortunately, there is at least one instance where an autocorrect mistake ended up causing someone’s death when it changed “nutter” to “mutter” for one Lancashire man. While it’s unclear why this word would be so triggering, it instigated an argument that caused the recipient to attack the sender, leading to the former being stabbed in the heart.