Every verse in the corpus has a comparison page showing each public-domain translation that renders it, grouped by what the translators were trying to do — and with the words that actually change marked, instead of leaving you to spot them.
Translations fall into families. Knowing which family a version belongs to explains most of the differences you will see on a comparison page.
Seventeenth-century wording and sentence shape. Familiar, rhythmic, and the version most quotations you have heard are taken from.
Follows Hebrew and Greek word order and grammar closely, even where the English becomes stiff. Useful for seeing what the underlying sentence is doing.
Contemporary vocabulary and punctuation, aiming for the sentence a present-day reader would write while staying close to the source.
Built from a deliberately small vocabulary so the sense stays reachable for new readers and non-native speakers. Trades nuance for clarity.
Widely quoted lines where the King James wording is what most people half-remember.
Passages where the choice of a single word changes how the sentence lands.
Verses people search for during grief, fear, illness, or waiting.
Passages chosen to be spoken aloud, where rhythm matters as much as sense.
The deuterocanonical books printed in the 1611 King James Bible, which few sites make searchable at all.
Eight public-domain English translations: the King James Version (1611/1769), the American Standard Version (1901), the Darby Bible (1890), Young's Literal Translation (1898), the World English Bible, both editions of the Open English Bible, and the Bible in Basic English. Copyrighted translations such as the NIV, ESV, NLT and NASB cannot be reproduced, so they are not shown.
Translators make three separate decisions: which Hebrew or Greek manuscripts to follow, how literally to render grammar that English does not share, and how formal the resulting English should be. A literal translation such as Young's keeps the original word order at the cost of natural English; a modern translation rewrites the sentence so it reads the way English readers expect.
Accuracy is not a single scale. A word-for-word translation is more accurate about grammar; a thought-for-thought translation is often more accurate about meaning. Reading two or three side by side, and then reading the whole chapter, tells you more than picking a winner.
Yes. The 15 books of the King James Apocrypha are included, and the World English Bible provides a modern rendering for most of them. Very few sites make these books searchable at all.