How to Make Your iPhone Messages Bold, Underlined and More in iOS 18 [CNET]

September 26, 2024 Zachary McAuliffe

You can also give your message a little flair by making the words explode, shake and more.

Zachary McAuliffe Staff writer

Zach began writing for CNET in November, 2021 after writing for a broadcast news station in his hometown, Cincinnati, for five years. You can usually find him reading and drinking coffee or watching a TV series with his wife and their dog.

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Apple software beta tester, “Helps make our computers and phones work!” – Zach’s grandparents

Apple released iOS 18 to the general public on Sept. 16, a week after the company announced its new iPhone 16 lineup, Apple Watch Series 10 and more at its September event. The update brought many new features to your iPhone, like ways to customize your home screen and RCS messaging. And for people who like a little nuance in their texting, you’ll also be able to make your texts stand out and more impactful with new text effects and formatting options.

Text effects range from bolding your text or making the letters explode across the message. You can also use these effects on a single word or phrase in a message to emphasize what you’re saying. Before these effects, all you could do was use all caps on a word or phrase, which is fine in some instances, but sometimes I want to make my words dance on screen because I’m dancing — poorly — as I type them.

Here’s how you can make your texts as expressive as you are.

Where to find text effects

Apple's iPhone iOS 18 text effects — James Martin/CNET

1. Open Messages.
2. Tap into a chat.
3. Tap the text box.
4. Tap the A with dashes on its left side, which can be found above the P on the keyboard.

This opens the text effects menu. Across the top of the menu are the formatting options bold, italics, underline and strike-through. Beneath that are eight different effects: Big, Small, Shake, Nod, Explode, Ripple, Bloom and Jitter.

You can select and use any combination of the formatting options at once, including all together. You can only use one text effect at a time. Text effects also clear any formatting options you may have selected. So you can’t bold your message and then use the effect Big — which causes the message to momentarily balloon in size.

Most of the effects feel like they could be used in a lot of situations, but a few feel well-suited for certain emotions or contexts. Ripple, for example, feels tailor-made for sarcasm, especially when used on a word like “really.”

Be aware that if you select formatting options, you have to tap the text box again for your keyboard to return. If you pick a text effect, your keyboard will automatically come back after you tap your desired effect.

Can you use more than one text effect?

You can use multiple effects in a single message, but you can’t apply multiple effects to the same word. So you can’t use the Big and Shake effects on your entire message, but you can apply Big to part of the message and Shake to the other part of the message. Here’s how.

A message using the explode text effect — Apple/Screenshot by CNET

1. Open Messages.
2. Tap into a chat.
3. Tap the text box.
4. Write your message in full.
5. Highlight the word or words you want to add an effect to.
6. Tap the A with dashes on its left side, which can be found above the P on the keyboard.
7. Tap the formatting options or text effect you want to use.

The formatting or text effect will be applied to whatever you highlighted. You can then highlight and apply further formatting or effects to other words in the message. That means you could use all the text effects in a single message if you try hard enough — I believe in you.

For more on iOS 18, here’s my iOS 18 review, how to use T9 dialing on your iPhone and our iOS 18 cheat sheet. You can also check out what might land on your iPhone with iOS 18.1.