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 not just the page address but the 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.

Keeping highlights on a phone

A shared link is a pointer, not a collection. 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.