How to Highlight Text on a Phone or Tablet

On a computer you drag a mouse. On a phone the same motion scrolls the page, which is why selecting text on a touchscreen feels clumsy until you learn the two gestures phones expect: press and hold to start a selection, then drag the handles to grow it. Everything else in this guide builds on those two moves.

Selecting text on iPhone and iPad

1. 1

   Press and hold a word

   Hold your finger on the first word until it lifts and turns blue. Let go; two handles appear.

2. 2

   Drag the handles

   Pull the end handle to the last word. Drag slowly near the edge of the screen and the page scrolls with you.

3. 3

   Use the menu

   Copy, Look Up, Translate and Share appear above the selection. Share is how you send a highlighted link (next section).

Faster selections: double-tap a word to select it, triple-tap to select a paragraph in most apps. In Safari, if text will not select because the page fights the gesture, open Reader (the icon at the left of the address bar, then Show Reader) and select there. With an Apple Pencil or a trackpad, you can drag directly.

Selecting text on Android

The gesture is the same: long-press a word, then drag the two handles. Android adds a magnifier and, in Chrome, a small toolbar with Copy, Share, Select all and sometimes Translate. Double-tap selects a word; there is no triple-tap, but dragging a handle across a paragraph selects it in one motion. Some apps replace the system menu with their own; if Share is missing, Copy the text and use the generator instead.

The share sheet trick: send a link to the highlighted passage

Chrome on Android and Safari on iPhone both create text fragment links when you share a selection. Select the passage, tap Share, and choose where it goes. What arrives is the page address plus #:~:text= and your words, so the recipient's browser opens the page scrolled to the passage with it highlighted. In Chrome the option is sometimes shown as Link to text; in Safari it happens automatically when you share from a selection.

How to highlight text on iPhone, step by step: a worked example

A teacher reads a news article in Safari on an iPhone and wants to send one sentence to a class group and keep it for a lesson. Every tap is listed, because on a phone the order matters.

1. Touch and hold the first word of the sentence. Wait until it lifts and shows blue; lift your finger. Two handles appear.
2. Drag the right handle slowly to the end of the sentence. If the page scrolls instead, you moved too early; tap once outside the selection and start again.
3. In the menu above the selection, tap the arrow (or scroll the menu) until Share appears, then tap it.
4. Choose Messages and the class group. The message contains the page address ending in #:~:text= and the sentence. Send it.
5. Tap Share again, choose Notes, and add the note to a lesson note. The sentence and the link now sit in a place you can find next week.

Open the link on a second device to check it lands on the sentence. The link is the same kind Chrome and Edge make on a computer, and the text fragment reference explains what a text fragment link carries if you want to understand the address.

Where phone highlights are kept, app by app

Pitfalls on a small screen

• Sharing from the page menu instead of the selection. The share icon at the bottom of Safari sends a plain link to the page top. Share from the menu that appears above the selected text.
• In-app browsers. Links opened inside social or mail apps show the page in a small built-in browser whose selection menu may lack Share. Use the app's Open in Safari or Open in Chrome option first.
• Overshooting the handle. A selection that ends one character into the next sentence makes the link search for text that does not exist as a phrase. Drag back until the full stop is the last character.
• Links from a phone app's own address. Some news apps share an app-only address. Open the story in the browser and copy the address from the address bar.

Expert tips

• Turn the phone sideways for a long selection; longer lines mean fewer handle drags.
• Use Safari Reader (the icon at the left of the address bar) on cluttered pages; selection is far more reliable there and Share still builds the highlight link.
• Paste each shared link into one running note with the quoted words beside it. Over a term that note is a record of what you read on the phone that survives every change to the pages themselves.

Keeping highlights on a phone

A shared link points at the page; it does not keep a copy. If you read a lot on your phone and want highlights that accumulate, you have three kinds of tool. Reading apps for saved articles (read-later apps) let you highlight in a clean view and export the highlights. E-book apps (Books, Kindle, Kobo) keep highlights per book and sync them across devices. And web annotation extensions now exist for mobile browsers that allow extensions, notably Safari on iPhone and iPad and Firefox on Android. Our guide to annotation and read-later apps explains the trade-offs; the short version is that a read-later app is the most comfortable way to highlight long articles on a small screen.

PDFs and e-books on a phone

In a PDF, the long-press gesture selects text and the menu offers Highlight directly (Files and Books on iPhone; Drive and Acrobat on Android). The highlight is written into the file when you save. In e-book apps, select and choose a colour; highlights live in your account for that book and usually export as a list. Both are covered in the PDF highlighting guide.

Phones make precise selection harder, so two other guides pair well with this one: making a link that opens at a highlighted sentence, which works in mobile browsers, and highlighting inside PDF documents, for files opened on a tablet. Every device-specific method is collected on the guides hub.