Why Does “Jesus” Appear 973 Times and Not 983 Times?
Note that since apostrophes and hyphens are included as word characters, words
that are possessive, for example “Jesus’” (with the apostrophe) is considered a
different word than “Jesus” (without the apostrophe). This was done
intentionally so that possessive forms of the word can be uniquely searched
without it getting confused with other forms.
This means that if you want to search for either “Jesus” or “Jesus’”, where your
search doesn’t distinguish between the two, you will need to use “Jesus*” or
“Jesus | Jesus'” instead. “Jesus” (no apostrophe) appears 973 times and “Jesus’”
(with apostrophe) appears 10 times. “Jesus*” will match all 983 occurrences.
Without doing it this way, we’d have no way to independently search the various
forms of words. The same applies to hyphens too, depending on the
Included with the application is a spreadsheet file (kjv_summary.xls), installed in
the “doc” subfolder where King James Pure Bible Search is installed. This
spreadsheet lists all 12838 unique words as recognized by King James Pure Bible
Search and includes a list of their alternate forms (its various letter-case forms)
and shows the count by Book of where that word is found in the Bible.
If you sum the first column of counts, which is the occurrence counts within the
Entire Bible, you will get the 790849 total words within the King James Bible,
which includes both the 789629 of the text proper and the 1220 of the colophons
and superscriptions. And you can quickly sum the other columns to get the total
number of words per Testament or per Book. There wasn’t a good way of
showing Chapters or Verses in the spreadsheet. To get those counts, use King
James Pure Bible Search to display them (by pressing Ctrl-D [Command-D] or
selecting View Details from the menu).
In the development of King James Pure Bible Search, absolutely nothing is
hardcoded or is unique to the King James text itself, even the names and number
of Testaments aren’t hardcoded. This means that the program could be used to
search and study any translation of the Bible (or other text for that matter) as long
as a database is built for it. You could easily add the Apocrypha or the Book of
Mormon or whatever.
You would, however, have to find the text and parse it and build your own
database files to support it. The command-line tools used to generate the current
database, as checked into the “purebiblesearch” repository on SourceForge, could
be used for other texts, but would have to be slightly modified, as they were done
specifically for the King James text from the OSIS (
This version allows multiple Bible Databases to be opened, each in a separate
Search Window, but work is in progress to eventually allow them to be viewed
side-by-side and/or in an interlinear format, so that a direct comparison and
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