A handheld electronic device includes a reduced QWERTY keyboard and is enabled with disambiguation software that is operable to disambiguate text input. In addition to identifying and outputting representations of language objects that are stored in the memory and that correspond with a text input, the device is able to generate artificial variants in certain circumstances. Each artificial variant is compared with N-gram data on the handheld electronic device and is suppressed from being output if the artificial variant is determined to have a low probability of being the input intended by a user.