Is there any setting I can change on my iPad to prevent one tap from selecting an entire word?

Thank god I’m not the only one.

THIS IS SOO IRRITATING !!

It’s not just Mail, it’s the whole text input. Even to write this comment. It happens ALL THE TIME !!!

People change phone for less than this.

njzeus: This has been a major pain for me on my iphone .. the Mail app. Tapping on the screen will have the cursor select the a full word .. and then have it pop up very wrong and misspelled replacements.

After much toying around, I figured that if you turn off the “Slide To Type” option under General > Keyboards, it stops this very annoying behavior.

I’m surprised that the Apple rep could not reproduce this behavior. It’s been a major annoyance since the last iOS release.

This is not the issue…Apple. Tapping once should merely place or move the cursor, not select anything. Please fix this!!!!

Thanks for clarifying this. Seems that option is poorly named since it affects both cursor placement and deletion of the most recently swipe-to-typed word. I wish Apple would hold off on the next 10 gimmicks no one asked for or wants and instead improved on the last 50 poorly implemented features, and then moving forward they could measure twice and cut once maybe…

Thank you so much yohaan!!

That has been a major irritant to me and your fix works except it was Delete slide-to-type by word I had to uncheck.

I quite like side to type itself, just not the selection and deletion of a whole word as soon as you drop the cursor anywhere.

Hi! I wanted to know if there’s possibly another solution? I’ve tried turning both off and it still will highlight entire words I tap on which drives me absolutely insane.

Unfortunately this fix doesn't seem to last. The issue will reappear even though the "Delete slide-to-type by word" toggle remains off. I found that cycling the toggle (on then off again) fixes the behavior for some amount of time before it returns. Just embarrassing having such terrible bugs in the "most advanced blah blah blah" operating system from a company of geniuses that seems to be only good at marketing... (The whole experience of being an Apple user is increasingly embarrassing on a daily basis.)

same issue as njzeus, but on iPhone 15 pro max. It is your software. Please quit blaming the customer. It’s very annoying

^^^ 100% agree with ninjadude9! @Apple - Fix the known issues with iOS (we all could offer a few suggestions) and then once those are fixed, devote resources to develop the gimmicks no one is asking for.

Omgness it happens to me on my iPhone and I’ve been searching for any helpful information to resolve it. It seems like it occurred with one of the updates & it’s so annoying !

Anytime I touch anything in the text field , it wants to highlight it , change the spelling to an often misspelled word & if I don’t happen to catch it, I look like some idiot with typos .. its so frustrating!!!

It takes so long to get through the multiple words being affected and this occurs like if I wanna select any portion of a text to copy or to remove / change any portion and essentially , any time I touch the curser at any point in the text field , it’s going to select whichever word , try to change it / change it , I have to continually tap different places to move the curser away from whatever word it’s attempting to alter & sometimes it will finally actually just end up at a place where the curser shows before or after a word like it used to do , which I’ve not figured out what triggers that , but I think it only does it where there’s a space before a punctuation mark , rather than between any words like it has always done before this frustrating mess , if I’m making proper sense.

It was sort of hard to even type my question in google, not fully knowing the technical terminology I was trying to explain , so after a second attempt , I actually found someone’s post in the search results that led me here … ugh it’s so annoying! I hope someone is able to offer some solution. I get so sick of technology having so many issues , only to have support in various platforms / devices , etc. offer the most irrelevant info , like I generally deal with especially with my Fitbit lol. It’s always oh have you restarted ur device and made sure ur wearing it right ? When it’s clearly a software issue they’ve known about but only wanna throw up the most generic / irrelevant junk … sorry , I didn’t mean to project my Fitbit frustration in an Apple thread hahaha !! But I’m only complaining about that in relation to how it feels when we seek help and only get the same types of responses from most support teams haha , so hopefully Apple will resolve this and give us all some sort of solution and peace of mind!!

Yes this is driving me crazy and so inefficient- takes 3 times as long to write a message, fix, correct, etc. It’s infuriating. Please correct this. We did not ask for this feature.

SkribHD wrote:

Yes this is driving me crazy and so inefficient- takes 3 times as long to write a message, fix, correct, etc. It’s infuriating. Please correct this. We did not ask for this feature.

It's quite possible that lots of people did ask for such a feature. It can sometimes be difficult to remember that not everyone has the same needs or preferences.

Apple doesn't read here in this user-to-user forum for feedback or suggestions. You can, however, let them know your thoughts here:

Product Feedback - Apple

Happy Pi Day!

Hello njzeus,

We understand that you're having an issue when tapping on any kind of message on your iPad after updating the software.

We were able to test this on our end with more than one iPad and we were unable to reproduce what you're experiencing. We'd like to have you try some basics, to try to resolve this issue.

1. Close any apps open on the iPad.
2. Restart the iPad.
3. Test to see if the issue remains.

If the issue persists, take a look at the iPadOS 17 user guide page we have below that might help with resolving what you're experiencing, as some features may have changed.

Select, cut, copy, and paste text on iPad - Apple Support

If the issue remains, you may want to reach out to Apple Support to have this looked into further.

Take care.

It used to work regardless of side to type. I would love to keep using slide to type, but not have this annoying behavior. I’d rather a single tap would move the cursor, like before, while I use side to type.

While I haven’t extensively tested this does seem like it works on my ipad and iphone. Thanks!