Search for a word in the Bible

466,653 verses, indexed in each language's own dictionary. The count before the results, the scope by Testament, and the word marked where it was found.

2026-08-13
On this page

From the list of books, the Search button opens the search. It covers the whole selected version, not just the chapter on screen.

The count comes before the list

The number of matching verses appears before the results: "121 verses · Louis Segond 1910".

That is what tells you whether to narrow your question or start reading. Putting it at the bottom would amount to not giving it at all.

The order is the Bible's own

Results run from Genesis to Revelation, never by "relevance". On one-line verses, a relevance ranking distinguishes almost nothing, whereas a canonical order is read the way a Bible is read.

It is also the only order that makes paging reliable: with unstable sorting, a verse already read reappears on page 2.

The scope

Three choices: All, Old Testament, New Testament.

This is not a convenience. "grace" returns more than three thousand verses across the whole Bible; restricted to the New Testament, it returns sixty-six. That is the difference between a list you read and a list you give up on.

Why the word is marked

The term found is highlighted in every result, by prefix and ignoring accents. Searching "love" marks "loved"; searching "grace" marks "grâce".

It is the same rule that surfaced the verse: the search is stemmed, and if the display only marked the exact string, half the results would carry no mark at all.

Every language is searched in its own language

The 466,653 verses are indexed with their own language's dictionary, not with the French one.

The difference is not theoretical. Searching "te", the Lingala negation, used to return zero verses: "te" is a stop word in French, and the French index removed it from every text. It now returns 9,768.

Note: nine of our fifteen languages have a native dictionary in the database. The other six, including Lingala and Hausa, search for the exact word, with no foreign rule wrongly applied to them.

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