The King James Bible has a vocabulary of less than 15,000 words (which includes thousands of names and places).
An average 10-year-old has a larger vocabulary than this. This means that a child can also learn the vocabulary of the Bible (2 Tim 3:15).
The Bible’s vocabulary is far less than the average adult vocabulary (which is 25,000-30,000 words). This means the average adult knows more words than the number of different words in the Bible.
A significant portion of an adult’s vocabulary consists of technical words and words that did not exist when the Bible was put into English. This means there are words that we use in everyday speech and ministry that are not in the Bible, and vice versa.
Nevertheless, the number of different words is also well within the range of a non-native speaker’s vocabulary. This means you could read the Bible as a second language. In the past, many learned to read from using the Bible.
The Bible is 10 times as long as a typical novel but contains a similar number of different words. This means the Bible is readable for a text of its size and composition.
This is all amazing given that the Bible consists of 66 different books written by about 40 different authors (with different vocabularies), in different languages (with different vocabularies), over the span of 1,400 years in different historical circumstances (with different vocabularies).
The vocabulary of the Bible is the right size to be understood by the most people and a testimony to God’s wisdom in inspiration.
Thankfully,
Justin “logophile” Johnson