The Cupertino Effect refers to the phenomenon where a spell-checker mistakenly replaces a correct word not in its dictionary with a different word. This term originated from an oddity in old spellcheckers that did not recognize the unhyphenated version of the word co-operation. When individuals typed cooperation, instead of correcting it to co-operation, the machines would change it to Cupertino, leading to amusing errors in diplomatic documents. The Oxford University Press notes numerous instances of documents from the UN, NATO, and other international organizations accidentally using the term Cupertino. A similar issue is the Scunthorpe problem, where ordinary words are blocked by obscenity filters (named after the English town of Scunthorpe which has faced internet censorship due to the expletive in its name).
