How many words are in the Bible?

The English count

The King James Version of 1611, in its standard modernised form, contains approximately 783,137 words. Of these:

• Old Testament: approximately 593,000 words.
• New Testament: approximately 180,000 to 190,000 words (exact count varies by edition).

Other translations differ:

• BSB: approximately 757,000 words.
• NIV: approximately 727,000 words.
• ESV: approximately 757,000 words.
• NASB: approximately 781,000 words.

The variance reflects translation philosophy. Formal-equivalence translations (KJV, NASB, ESV) tend toward higher word counts; dynamic-equivalence translations (NIV) tend toward lower counts, since they often consolidate phrases.

The original-language counts

In the original languages:

• Hebrew Old Testament (Masoretic Text): approximately 305,000 to 312,000 words, depending on what is counted (Hebrew has compound suffixes that can be analysed as separate words or as parts of words).
• Greek New Testament: approximately 138,000 words.
• Aramaic portions of the OT: approximately 6,000 words (within the Hebrew OT total).

The original-language counts are much lower than the English because Hebrew and Greek are more compact languages than English — many English words (articles, auxiliary verbs, helper words) correspond to morphological features in the originals.

Chapters and verses

The Bible is divided into 1,189 chapters and approximately 31,100 verses across the 66 books of the Protestant canon. Chapter divisions were introduced in the 13th century (traditionally attributed to Stephen Langton). Verse divisions came later — for the Old Testament in the 1440s (Rabbi Isaac Nathan ben Kalonymus), and for the New Testament in 1551 (Robert Estienne).

Methodology

All word counts are approximate. Variables include:

• Whether contractions (“don’t,” “won’t”) count as one word or two.
• Whether numbers (“forty,” “1,000”) count separately.
• Edition differences (modern KJV editions silently correct typographical errors).
• Apocryphal or deuterocanonical books, which add tens of thousands of words to Catholic and Orthodox Bibles.