Patent ID: 8749406

Claim:
A handheld electronic device comprising: an input element; an output element; a processor; and a memory, the memory having stored therein a number of objects including a number of language objects comprised of a number of linguistic elements, wherein at least some of the language objects are stored in a first data source corresponding to a generic word list, and wherein at least some of the language objects are stored in a second data source corresponding to a user-defined word list; wherein the processor is configured to: detect an ambiguous input from the input element; search both the first data source corresponding to the generic word list and the second data source corresponding to the user-defined word list to identify a language object corresponding with an initial portion of the ambiguous input; search one of the first data source corresponding to the generic word list and the second data source corresponding to the user-defined word list to identify another language object corresponding with another portion of the ambiguous input; and output a representation of at least one proposed compound word for the ambiguous input to the output element, the representation comprising a representation of the language object and a representation of at least a portion of the another language object.