In editable text fields you can tap a word a few times and it'll select the whole paragraph, if that's any help.

What drives me insane though, is double tapping a word is supposed to select that word. But I think starting in iOS 18 it started selecting the word and a random amount of surrounding words, but only about half the time. I couldn't tell you what it could possibly be trying to do but it's maddening.

▲

spockz an hour ago | parent | next [-]

Just keeping my finger on the word works for me every time to select it. Double tap works only works in the edit fields. Also works reliable for me here in the hacker news post editor, as long as I do it in the middle of the word.

▲

OkGoDoIt 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

It’s using AI to try and determine if it’s a proper noun or other scenario where multiple words are really one semantic term. Except it’s really really bad at it and it’s almost never the behavior I want, but there’s no way to turn it off. (I vaguely remember there was a WWDC talk sometime a couple years ago where they went into how this works)

▲

hbn 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I know when I was on Android they'd do some smarts to detect stuff like that (handy for copying links)

But I swear if that's what they're trying to do here, I've never seen it work properly once. It's always just a random substring of the sentence.

	▲	disillusioned 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		It works surprisingly well on Android; expanding to grab a full address, for instance, or complete phone number. Sometimes it needs tweaking, but mostly it's directionally correct and helpful rather than harmful

▲

wonnage 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Word segmentation has been a longstanding problem in CJK languages too. Coupled with the terrible text selection in iOS it makes it really hard to select substrings.