Whether it's a dinner inquiry or an arrival time request, everyone has a handful of text phrases they tap out on a daily or weekly basis. Save your thumbs some needless work by creating a few iOS keyboard shortcuts.
Just go to Settings > General > Keyboards, then scroll to the bottom where you'll find the "Shortcuts" section. Under that, you can tap "Add New Shortcut" to create a shortcut.
I, for example, use "dindin" as a shortcut for the much longer phrase "What do you want to do for dinner?" and "Running" for "Running late, I'll be there soon!" These types of shortcuts come in especially handy when you need to send a quick message while stopped at a red-light -- DON'T text and drive, folks. All your shortcuts are editable should you decide one or more aren't as useful as you'd thought.
One caveat: Shortcuts cannot contain spaces, so you may need to get creative. You wouldn't want to use a word like "Running" in your shortcut if you tend to use that word in a number of other phrases. For "Where you at?", I wouldn't want to use the word "Where," so I use "wuat" as my shortcut word. Happy texting!
