King James Bible language

Lord – LORD; God – GOD

In Exodus 3:14, the Lord gave to Moses His covenant name I AM THAT I AM, using the four Hebrew letters: Jod He Waw He. This name is used throughout the Old Testament, but the later Jews came to consider the name so sacred that they ceased to pronounce it, and instead protected it by substituting the appropriate vowel indicators with those of the Hebrew word Adoni — Lord, or sometimes Elohim — God.

The Authorised Version translators thus use LORD, with an initial capital letter and small capitals for the other letters, to indicate JHWH with the vowel indicators of Adoni (e.g., Genesis 2:4), and GOD for those instances of JHWH with the vowels of Elohim (e.g., Genesis 6:5).

Places where both words appear together deserve special attention — only one of them, Lord or God, is written in capital letters, indicating that only one original Hebrew word is the Tetragrammaton JHWH. See for example Genesis 15:2 (And Abram said, Lord GOD, . . .) or Genesis 24:7 (The LORD God of heaven, . . .).

Pronouns: thou, thee, thy, etc.

In using thou, thee, …, ye, you, … the Authorised Version maintains the distinction between singular and plural second person pronouns that is present in the original Hebrew and Greek text. The examples below demonstrate the referents of the second person pronouns as used in the translation.

Second person singular

nominative — thou
objective — thee
genitive — thy/thine
possessive — thine

Second person plural (or formal singular)

nominative — ye
objective — you
genitive — your
possessive — yours

In the nominative case, the pronoun is the subject of a clause (e.g., Thou shalt not . . . ; Ye wives of Lamech . . . ). In the objective case, the pronoun is the object in a clause (e.g., I bring thee word . . . ; I have given you . . . ). The genitive case indicates possession and precedes a noun to indicate possession of that noun (e.g., Leave there thy gift . . . ; Take also your brother . . . ); word thine is used when the subsequent noun begins with a vowel or the letter h. The possessive case replaces a noun phrase and indicates possession (e.g., Why do the disciples of John fast often . . . but thine eat and drink?; . . . if they have kept my saying, they will keep yours also.).

The use of italics

In the Authorised Version translators decided that the words added, in order to give understanding of translated text to a reader, should be indicated in italic script, so that the reader would know that these words were not actually in the original texts.

King James Bible “archaic” words

Of the around 12,000 different words found in the King James Bible, only about 300 could truly be considered “archaic” or obscure in their meaning. Many of these words are only found once in the AV text. A list of about seven hundred less commonly used words with an instance count (some counts include plural forms and other variations of the word), definitions, and example references are listed below. The included definition sources are from: The Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd Ed., prepared by J.A. Simpson and E.S.C. Weiner, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1989, and An American Dictionary of the English Language… by Noah Webster, LL. D, New York, S. Converse, 1828. The list was initially compiled by Timothy S. Morton in 2012 and placed in the Public Domain, but the one published here was diligently revised and updated (in 2024) according to the Pure Cambridge Edition of the King James Bible.